The Shakespeare Wars Read online

  In fact for some time Knowles was, it seems to me, quite the loner; if not a complete outsider, certainly a lonely dissident going against the tide of Reviser thought that seemed to have swept the field in Shakespeare studies in the eighties and nineties. If one wants to use Gary Taylor’s Hamlet-inflected “palace coup” image, Knowles was the deposed occupant of the palace who dared to continue to speak up in opposition to the new regime.

  Nonetheless, in a relatively short time Knowles, firing off powerfully argued polemics, has almost single-handedly stemmed, if not reversed, the results of the coup. The rush to divide and distinguish the two versions of Lear at least. When I first spoke to him at a Folger Library MLA reception in 2001, he’d seemed to me to represent a resistance that was receding into the past. But by the time I spoke to him for the second time, four years later, the tide seemed to be shifting to his side of the battle, largely through his persistence.

  In polemic after polemic, including one anthologized in Lear from Study to Stage entitled “Two Lears? By Shakespeare?”, Knowles had pointed out the weak points of the Revisers’ case. First their inability to say with any certainty that the Folio changes had in fact been made by Shakespeare. Which were errors of transmission by scribes and compositors, which were actors’ or stage managers’ interpolations and which might have been Shakespeare’s “considered second thoughts” as the Revisers liked to believe? “The questions,” Knowles has written, “have not been answered, or are perhaps no longer answerable.”

  Knowles went on to raise the related objection that the arguments presented by the Revisers—that we were seeing Shakespeare’s own second thoughts—were often circular: the changes must be by Shakespeare because they were so perfectly brilliant; they were perfectly brilliant because they must have been by Shakespeare.

  The Revisers’ contention that the two Lears represent two separate works of art doesn’t always rely on a belief that all the changes were for the better, but it’s a habit some find hard to break.

  And then in a phone conversation with me Knowles disclosed an argument—an evidence-based argument—I hadn’t heard before.

  It was an argument he said he first made in a paper he delivered to an Atlanta conference of scholars. In the past he had focused on the weaknesses of the Revisers’ case for describing some changes as “Shakespeare’s considered second thoughts.” Here he was addressing what I’d always thought was the Revisers’ strongest argument: the additions that appear in the Folio texts of Hamlet and Lear. Unlike cuts, which could be done by taking something away that was already there, revisions for the Folio had to be created (unless one accepts one of Harold Jenkins’s weaker arguments that they were there, but were mistakenly deleted from the original Quarto draft).

  The Revisers had been coasting on the assumption that what was newly written in the Folio was something newly rewritten by Shakespeare. But now Knowles was citing to me on the phone his study of the language of the Folio additions. In which he’d found there was a far greater percentage of words in those additions that had never appeared, or only appeared rarely, in Shakespeare’s previous work. Which would argue that the Folio additions were not necessarily—or always—Shakespeare’s considered second thoughts, but rather the thoughts of a second hand, another writer entirely.

  It’s an argument that goes against instinct, perhaps, or one’s subjective sense of what is “Shakespearean,” when one considers the “precious instance” passage in Hamlet and the “Look her lips,/Look there, look there” lines in Lear. Could someone else have written them? Someone in Shakespeare’s company? The same person who may have revised Hamlet? Could a skilled imitator have fabricated “Shakespearean” additions? Again, study of the variants leads to a fascinating if subjective question: what one thinks Shakespeare capable of that others are not.

  Do words, lines, passages seem “Shakespearean” because we had always assumed only Shakespeare could write them? Was Shakespeare incapable of imitation? Could none of his cowriters—Fletcher, Middleton, Wilkins—be capable of imitating his voice? Knowles cites a study by Hamlet Variorum coeditor Eric Rasmussen, which suggests that the vocabulary of the Hamlet additions is subtly different in its rare-word usage from that of the Lear additions. The implication is that Shakespeare could have been responsible for one or neither set of additions—but not both.

  The mind reels. At what point then do we incorporate a putative “imitation”—or a line we may never know the provenance of—into the thing being imitated? Can we imagine Lear without “Look her lips …” merely because we cannot be absolutely sure it is an addition by Shakespeare?

  Does the loss—or at least the reduction to conjecture—of a Shakespearean origin of Lear’s dying words, of “Look her lips,/Look there, look there,” diminish our sense of Shakespeare? Of Lear? Can we entertain the idea that someone else could do those dying words just as well, indistinguishably from Shakespeare—even better than he could? Or if it’s “better,” is it less Shakespearean? Should purists cease speaking it on stage?

  These are important questions in esthetic theory, but Knowles feels there’s more to the story, indeed there’s a moral to the story of the rise and fall of the Revisers, a fall he assumes, since it hasn’t quite happened yet.

  For one thing he sees the Revision theory as a kind of marketing phenomenon, the scholarly equivalent of other speculative bubbles in its history—akin to “Tulipmania” and the nineties dot-com bubble—an emblem of all that has gone wrong with Shakespeare scholarship. (Indeed David Bevington, the prominent Shakespearean editor, compared it to “New Coke,” to the fury of Gary Taylor, who resented comparison by “reactionaries” to “a sugary beverage.” Other recent Shakespeare “bubbles”: the “Funeral Elegy”; the “Shakeshafte” theory.)

  After mocking the Revisers’ pretenses to a “Copernican revolution” in Shakespeare studies, Knowles says “the idea of two Lears was very aggressively and successfully marketed … to some … the notion of multiple and unstable texts of Lear seemed to offer a golden opportunity. In the words of Honigmann, ‘a gold rush, with more and more speculators jostling or encouraging each other.’ Before long the theories of revision and multiple versions of plays were further extended into other theories about textual instability: the ‘politics’ of editing, a putative ‘crisis’ in editing, hypertext and genetic editing, collaborative authorship and publication, the immateriality of the text and the immateriality of the author, the indeterminacy of meaning, the relation of literature to power and censorship and other notions and issues dear to recent critics who have in one way or another found the ideas of revision and multiple versions of Shakespeare’s plays, and particularly the exemplary disintegration of the standard version of his greatest tragedy, congenial and supportive to their own views.”

  Knowles’s catalog of the sins of postmodernist literary fads fed, in his view, by the Revisers, focused on Lear, does not, for me anyway, necessarily discount any element of the Revisers’ case: we don’t judge a theory by the motivations or subsequent generalizations of its believers but by the evidence that supports it. Nonetheless, what he says about the way the Revisers’ cause has been taken up by postmodern Theorists rings true.

  His caustic vision of those who profit from the Revisers’ separation of the texts is almost akin to Stephen Greenblatt’s vision of the scoffers at the base of the scaffold, laughing as the head and body of the condemned person were separated. Separated abruptly as the texts of Lear were separated by the “palace coup.”

  All of which is to say it has consequences outside a circle of adepts, consequences for what readers will—from now on—be given to read (and see) as Shakespeare, as Lear, as several of the other most consequential works of art in the language.

  The most surprising thing Knowles said to me was in his response to this question: Does he rule out Shakespeare’s revising hand in the changes entirely?

  No, he said, he doesn’t. He just suggests that such judgments are essentially critical decis
ions based on subjective considerations about what is “Shakespearean.” In his essay in Lear from Study to Stage Knowles tells us that “Given [the] limits of factual knowledge, conclusions about the authenticity of the Q and F versions must rest mainly upon critical impressions” (my italics). He goes on to say that “in the first half of the 20th century when Q was widely held to be an imperfectly reconstructed version of some kind of lost origin and F was accordingly regarded as superior, most editors and critics thought that the three hundred lines unique to Q seemed authentically Shakespearean …” (my italics).

  In other words decisions about the differences between Q and F Lear were really esthetic judgments about what we decide is more “Shakespearean”—judgments about us, about what we value—rather than the product of bibliographic “science.”

  Here Knowles converges again with Urkowitz, in this sense: Urkowitz departs, or did in conversation with me, from some of his fellow Revisers in that he doesn’t make the assumption that the Folio changes must always be superior to the earlier Quarto version (usually because of the assumption that as the more theatrical version the Folio is more truly “Shakespearean” because Shakespeare felt his work was most fully realized on stage). Nor does he insist that the changes must be improvements, because a genius like Shakespeare can only improve.

  Like Knowles, Urkowitz believes there can be merits to both versions—that these are subjective judgments about what one considers Shakespearean rather than matters of “scientific” determination. Rather than arguing over which version is superior, or “more Shakespearean,” he suggests it’s better to spend time in teasing out the implications of each variant. Here he joins Knowles in endorsing a subjective critical and esthetic examination of the versions.

  This is more than a subject for leisurely open-ended reflection for some. It’s an urgent matter for directors, Urkowitz reminds me, because directors have to make choices between the two versions, whether one can (as almost all do) include variants from both. But in each case it’s a choice that requires an esthetic strategy or theory about why one includes and omits what one does. To use a metaphor from physics, readers and scholars can forever entertain the potential for each version; directors must end the indeterminacy, “collapse the wave,” choose one variant to be uttered on stage.

  My choice of a metaphor from physics is not idle; both Urkowitz and Knowles had something else unexpected in common: they both began studying physics before they turned to Shakespeare.

  For Urkowitz more than Knowles, this has had a profound effect. In Urkowitz’s case his talent for physics fed a facility for extrapolating spatial/temporal relationships from reading Shakespeare and became, he told me, the basis for his ultimate vocation: directing Shakespeare. He discovered that he had an ability to read a scene in a text and then somehow visualize the potential array of spatial—and emotional—relationships between the bodies in motion on the stage and the expressive and thematic significance each potential constellation of forces could evoke.

  The way Urkowitz described it to me, it recalled Nabokov’s description of the way chess wizards could view the board, not as peopled by individual pieces, but rather as vectors of force projected by pieces, vectors of force that radiated, and reflected and intersected, other vectors of force.

  It was actually the study of the physics of bodies in motion that got him interested in the two-Lear problem. Dead bodies in motion.

  “I was working up the action in the last scene of Lear, figuring out how many people you need to carry off the bodies,” he told me.

  “You know, can you get away with two? Well, [in addition to Goneril and Regan,] you have to carry Edmund’s [dying but not dead] body off stage. And I’m looking at the stage directions in the two versions and the moment when Edmund is carried off is different in each.”

  It led Urkowitz, who was at the University of Chicago at the time, to begin writing a paper on the importance of the differences in the two Lears. At the same time, Michael Warren at Berkeley and Gary Taylor and Peter Blayney at Cambridge were working on similar efforts to convince the world that we can no longer believe there is just one Lear, the ideal Lost Archetype Lear that all the differently conflated Lears strive for.

  It’s fascinating when Urkowitz recites the roll call of his old allies, how many divisions there now are between the rebels who divided the kingdom. Very Henry IV. Urkowitz has issues with Gary Taylor on scholarly grounds; Taylor says Blayney hates him; Blayney has mysteriously abandoned his projected second volume on the two texts of Lear.

  But entering into a labyrinth of Lear variations has its rewards if one is not an embattled partisan. It encourages a closer study, entangles one more deeply in the language and in some quieter, lesser known lines that might have otherwise escaped attention in the focus on mighty themes.

  I’d asked Steven Urkowitz during our dinner the same question I’d asked Stephen Greenblatt: if he thought the differences between the Quarto and Folio were so great they marked them as different works of art.

  “Well, yeah, I think on issues of personal responsibility, some in Lear, mostly in Albany, but also in the audience.”

  “In the audience?”

  “The things that are being changed that matter here affect the comfort/discomfort axis of the audience.”

  To explain, he invokes an influential (okay, “influential” here perhaps mainly among adepts) book by Stephen Booth, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy.

  “Booth refers to Olivier’s famous preface to his film version of Hamlet—‘This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.’ No, Booth says, and this goes for Lear as well, it’s the tragedy of an audience that can’t make up its mind. In Hamlet we’re whipsawed from hating Claudius to being in sympathy with him, from believing the Ghost to agreeing with Hamlet there is no such thing and back—these torment the audience.”

  And Lear? Here he takes a position opposite to Gary Taylor’s: Urkowitz believes the Quarto is the more redemptive version.

  “What happens in Lear, there are certain spots where in the first [Quarto] version we agree with various ameliorative visions of the world—”

  “The servants who offer to heal Gloucester’s bleeding eyes …”

  “Yes, and these are stripped out in the Folio version. You are going to get a much harsher experience, not just the servants but things like Edgar’s heartfelt reaction before he sees Gloucester, Kent and the Gentleman talking about Cordelia and Lear being reunited. Over and over again though we return to the experience as an audience of undecidability.”

  I should say I’m undecided about the undecidedness alternative, myself. I’m not sure the Folio dying words alone can turn the play on its head from tragic to redemptive. I’m not sure how undecided we feel. I’m undecided about whether a playwright would wield his most powerful dramatic gifts over the course of a three- to four-hour production mainly to leave the audience … undecided. Although on the other hand one could say undecidedness—about the moral nature of the cosmos—is an intrinsic element of tragedy. I know I found myself in a constant state of undecidedness while weighing the conflicting claims of the two factions in the two-Lear controversy.

  Gary Taylor was one of the first contemporary scholars to argue the case that the new ending of Lear, the Folio last words, represents the intervention of a later Shakespeare, the Shakespeare of the Late Romances. And thus a different Lear: “Some sense of hope, transcendence, spiritual consolation the Folio version surely offers. The interrelated changes in the Folio’s dramatization of the ending of King Lear produce an effect strikingly similar to the resonant emotional complexity of the most memorable scenes in The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline.”

  In other words—as with the addition of the “precious instance” passage in Hamlet, the addition of “the silver livery of age” passage that Richard Proudfoot pointed out in Henry VI—the Folio ending of Lear, Taylor seemed to be saying, drapes the tragedy in the silver livery of a Late Romance. But le
t’s return to a close focus on the last words. On one of the most heroic efforts to rationalize the variations. Does it offer a way out of the labyrinth of undecidability?

  A FEARFUL SYMMETRY? OR SUICIDE BY SIGHS

  The quest to define the nature of the shift between the Quarto and Folio versions of Lear’s dying words may have found its most strenuous exegete in the scholar Alexander Leggatt and his paper “How Lear Dies,” which he delivered at a seminar at a Shakespeare Association of America conference. It’s a thesis anyone such as myself seeking some resolution of the question must contend with.

  Leggatt begins with something I had a particular interest in: the disappearing O-groans in the Folio Lear. Recall that Shakespeare (or someone) had added four O-groans to Hamlet’s last words in the Quarto: “The rest is silence.” And that Shakespeare (or someone) had subtracted four O-groans from Lear’s dying words in the Folio.

  Leggatt attempts to convince us there is something more to Lear’s (and possibly Hamlet’s) O-groans than potentially expressive swan songs.

  He suggests there is evidence that the O-groans were meant not to suggest the effect of dying but the cause. That emitting O-groan-like sighs was recognized as a method of committing suicide in Elizabethan literary convention—bringing one’s life to a close, expelling one’s spirit. Suicide by sighs.

  “In Shakespeare’s time,” Leggatt tells us, “sighs and groans were thought to shorten life.” Leggatt argues that Lear’s four O-groans in the Quarto would be designed to be seen (and heard) by audiences as his deliberate attempts to take control of his death, to shorten his life, cause himself to die by successive life-shortening sighs. Something he achieves moments after he utters “O, o, o, o,” when he commands himself to die: