The Shakespeare Wars Read online

And hark what discord follows. Each thing meets

  In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters

  Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,

  And make a sop of all this solid globe;

  Strength should be lord of imbecility,

  And the rude son should strike his father dead …

  And appetite, an universal wolf

  (So doubly seconded with will and power),

  Must make perforce an universal prey,

  And last eat up himself.…

  Ravenous fishes eating themselves up in Sir Thomas More and appetite a universal wolf that devours itself in Troilus and Cressida.

  That just begins to catalog the places that self-devouring image appears in Shakespeare. The horrible line in Lear in which he consigns Cordelia to the company of savage cannibals who don’t just eat each other but make their “generation messes.” That is, make meals of their own progeny, eat their children.

  And then there’s the remarkable passage in Macbeth, one that describes the dark portents that follow the murder of King Duncan. It’s a conversation between the all-purpose factotum and stolid reporter of war news, Ross, and a mysterious “Old Man.”

  ROSS: And Duncan’s horses (a thing most strange and certain),

  Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race,

  Turn’d wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out,

  Contending ‘gainst obedience, as they would make

  War with mankind.

  OLD MAN: ’Tis said, they eat each other.

  ROSS: They did so—to th’ amazement of mine eyes

  That look’d upon’t.

  What an amazing recurrent image. The passage first conjures up the wild and beautiful stallions and then makes a point of insisting that it was not a metaphor, not some folk tale with mythic resonance. No, when the Old Man raises the stakes and says “ ’Tis said, they eat each other,” the play’s chief witness, Ross, affirms it—“They did so”—and reiterates that he was an eyewitness, and not just to the stallions going wild, “contending ’gainst obedience,” but to the astonishing “fact” that the horses did “eat each other.”

  Again it’s explicitly related to the breakdown of authority, but as in Hand D, where the self-devouring fishes “feed on one another,” in Lear where fear is expressed that “Humanity must peforce/Feed on itself like monsters of the deep,” and in Troilus, “appetite, an universal wolf,” eats itself up—when you think about it, this is a physical impossibility. When you think about it further it’s a metaphysical impossibility as well. Matter turning on itself and consuming itself. If, as it’s said, you can’t get something from nothing, neither can you get nothing from something. (In the most mundane terms if the horses in Macbeth did “eat each other” they both would grow fat with each other and yet disappear into each other—if you take the image literally. This reciprocal devouring seems to imply their mutual disappearance, just like the wolf which consumes itself into nonbeing. In a way just like Paul Werstine’s polemics devouring both sides of an argument at once.)

  It is almost as if this image, like the image of the exchange of bodies, souls, eyes, is one of those rich and strange, recurrent images that Shakespeare was drawn back repeatedly to worry over, revise, re-envision. That in these images of self-devouring we are somehow brought closer to Shakespeare, to his mind, to his imaginative preoccupations—his imaginative fingerprints if you will. The fact those fingerprints can be found in Hand D goes a long way to making it seem “Shakespearean” to me, indeed to help define what “Shakespearean” is—even though this is exactly what Paul Werstine warns against.

  Perhaps even more interesting in this regard is another of what might be called “fingerprint passages” in Sir Thomas More, this one in what’s known as the “Hand C addition,” which many have also attributed to Shakespeare, although unlike Hand D it is not argued to be in his handwriting, but more likely that of a theatrical scribe who may have copied a Shakespearean handwritten addition to the play.

  It’s a twenty-one-line soliloquy that goes like this:

  MORE: It is in heaven that I am thus and thus,

  And that which we profanely term our fortunes

  Is the provision of the power above,

  Fitted and shap’d just to that strength of nature

  Which we are born [withal]. Good God, good God,

  That I from such an humble bench of birth

  Should step up as ‘twere to my country’s head

  And give the law out there. I in my father’s life

  To take prerogative and tithe of knees

  From elder kinsmen, and him bind by my place

  To give the smooth and dexter way to me

  That owe it him by nature. Sure these things

  Not physick’d by respect might turn our blood

  To much corruption. But, More, the more thou hast

  Either of honor, office, wealth, and calling

  Which might accite thee to embrace and hug them,

  The more do thou in serpents’ natures think them,

  Fear their gay skins with thought of their sharp

  state,

  And let this be thy maxime: to be great

  Is, when the thread of hazard is once spun,

  A bottom great wound up, greatly undone..

  Setting aside its putative biographical interest—if it’s Shakespeare, one could read into it more than a meditation on the rise of More from humble provincial beginnings; one could read into it Shakespeare meditating on his own rise (“in my father’s life”) to prominence in London from humble provincial beginnings.

  And setting aside the stylistic tics that have the ring of Shakespeare—the two hendiadys (“smooth and dexter way” and “prerogative and tithe of knees”)—there is that final couplet which invokes the image of a “bottom.”

  … to be great

  Is, when the thread of hazard is once spun,

  A bottom great wound up, greatly undone.

  To be great, to be at the top, is to be “a bottom,” literally a big old weaver’s spool with the thread wound up on it. But to be great is simultaneously to come unwound, to come undone, to become—one almost might say—bottomless.

  There is much unresolved controversy over the dating of Sir Thomas More, which makes it impossible to say whether the passage about the bottom was written before A Midsummer’s Night Dream with its Bottom, and Bottom’s bottomless dream.

  But before or after, whichever way the influence might run, I felt an unmistakable kinship between the two “bottoms.” The use of “bottom” in Hand C in the sense of spinning a thread (creating a story) is somehow connected with the undoing, the uncreating of a once-fat and solid bottom to the bottomlessness of a dream, of the Dream. And there is, I’d argue as well, a link between that image and the image of self-devouring in Hand D.

  All in all, despite my Elegy-bred skepticism it was that bottom image that made me feel there was something to the Thomas More attributions.

  Not so fast, says Paul Werstine. Not so fast, says Katherine Duncan-Jones. Duncan-Jones’s disavowal comes mainly in passing in the Preface to her book Ungentle Shakespeare, so I asked her, in an e-mail, if she wanted to expand on her dismissal of Hand D. And before getting more deeply engaged with Paul Werstine’s more comprehensive attack let me report what she replied:

  My doubts arise a) from the fact that half a dozen [alleged Shakespeare] signatures, all very late, and all giving the appearance of a hand in decay/haste do not constitute a sufficient sample for secure identification of the appearance of that hand overall; and from b) from the problematic nature of Shakespeare acting as scribe and/or poet for a rival playing company at a period of his career when he was particularly busy and successful. I know that at least one senior manuscripts expert at the British Library shares my skepticism,—but of course the BL has a lot “invested” in believing they hold a literary manuscript in Shakespeare’s hand.

  “INDIAN” OR “JUDEAN”?
r />   So academic politics may play a hand in the Hand D controversy, but Paul Werstine felt the issue was more than academic, indeed, went to the heart of how we define Shakespeare, how Shakespeare is being redefined even now.

  The example he cites of the consequences to what he believes is the over-hasty adoption of Hand D into the canon is its effect on one of the oldest, longest-lasting controversies in all Shakespearean textual scholarship. It has to do with Othello’s final words. The almost unbearable farewell speech he makes in the wake of his discovery he’d been tricked by Iago into murdering the wife he loved to distraction, Desdemona. (Fascinating the way the last words of the great tragic figures—Hamlet, Lear, Othello—are all in dispute.)

  In Othello’s case, he pleads with the stunned witnesses to his deed to

  Speak of me as I am …

  Of one that lov’d not wisely but too well;

  Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought,

  Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand

  (Like the base Indian) threw a pearl away

  Richer than all his tribe …

  Or is it not “Like the base Indian” but rather “Like the base Judean”? It’s “Indian” in the 1608 Quarto of Othello; it’s “Judean” in the 1623 Folio version—and the difference is not trivial. While “Indian” is found elsewhere in Shakespeare—the “spicy Indian night” in the Dream, for instance—if it’s “Judean,” it carries multiple deeper resonances. Othello as a Judas figure (the base Judean); the pearl, as in the biblical parable of pearls before swine, a Jesus parable reference. Combined with Othello’s utterance immediately following this, his dying boast that “in Aleppo once” he “smote” a “turban’d Turk” as a loyal servant of a Christian state, it gives the tragedy a multiply ramified Christian framework focused on that single word, “Judean.” If it is “Judean,” and not “Indian.”

  Werstine points out how a recent editor, the much laureled textual scholar Ernst Honigmann, has used Hand D to come to a conclusion about whether it should be “Indian” or “Judean.”

  Honigmann is the author of the groundbreaking 1965 book The Stability of Shakespeare’s Text, which actually argues for the instability of Shakespeare’s text—because of the difficulty of deciding which variants are printers’ or scribes’ errors and which might be Shakespeare’s changes, and how to decide between alternatives.

  Werstine depicts Honigmann as having decided the Indian/Judean issue by examining the way the letters of the problematic word were formed, when those letters were used in the handwriting of Hand D, which is supposedly Shakespeare’s. On the basis of Hand D’s letter-shaping formation (the I a J? the e an i?), Honigmann believes the compositor of the Quarto Othello misread Shakespeare’s handwritten “Judean” as “Indian” and someone, maybe Shakespeare, thought the error serious enough to change it to “Judean” in the Folio version.

  This is Werstine’s problem: not that Honigmann is necessarily wrong about “Indian” or “Judean,” but that he has made a crucial decision—a decision with implications for how we construe the theological vision of one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies—on the basis of the hand of Hand D. This is what Werstine warned against when he said that the hand of Hand D was in a subtle way playing a part in “writing” or creating Shakespeare. All on the basis of what Werstine believes is inadequate evidence.

  When I questioned him on the phone Werstine told me he never took the “Funeral Elegy” seriously, but said, yes, “this sort of thing” (deciding “Indian/Judean”-type questions) would be likely to happen if the “Funeral Elegy” attribution had not been discredited: decisions on crucial Shakespearean textual questions might well come to be decided on the basis of what we now see is an unquestionably discredited attribution.

  Werstine’s Florilegium attack on the Hand D attribution is strongest on the handwriting and spelling evidence. He points out that the argument that occasional idiosyncratic spellings in Hand D match some idiosyncratic spellings in the early printed texts of Shakespeare’s plays falls apart without conclusive evidence that the early printed versions we have were set up from Shakespeare’s handwriting and not (for instance) from earlier, no longer available printed versions or scribal transcriptions that reflect the scribe’s, not Shakespeare’s, spelling tics. “If some were and some were not” printed from Shakespeare’s handwriting, as a critic Werstine quotes puts it, “the argument cuts its own throat.” Self-devouring again.

  That’s harsh, but again Werstine isn’t saying Hand D can’t possibly be Shakespeare, he’s saying that arguments on the basis of handwriting (the sacred “Six Signatures” matched to Hand D’s controversial “Three Pages”) and spelling are not strong enough to support any certainty.

  But I found Werstine’s arguments uncharacteristically less persuasive when it came to the thematic affinities between Hand D and canonical Shakespeare: the wolfish appetite devouring itself in Troilus and the devouring fishes feeding on themselves in Hand D, the parallel first suggested by R. W. Chambers. “In the Hand D segments,” Werstine writes, the wolf from Troilus, which is paradoxically its own prey, and Hand D’s fish that feed on each other both suggest “cannibal monsters” to Chambers. “To arrive at this parallel,” Werstine says, “Chambers had to equate a creature’s eating itself, which is hardly cannibalism in any sense of the word, to its eating another member of its own species.”

  A man devouring himself not cannibalism? Perhaps it’s an arcane point, but here I felt like rising to Chambers’s defense: if he hasn’t expressed with exactitude the nature of the resonance between the wolf devouring itself and the fish feeding on themselves (by describing it as cannibalism, as opposed to “self-devouring,” say), that doesn’t deny that a resonance exists. To me it’s still a significant point that Werstine doesn’t really succeed in knocking down by knocking over the straw horse of “cannibalism.” In attempting to dismiss the case for imagistic parallelism, one might say, Werstine mentions—without engaging—other such self-devouring image analogues found by other scholars in Coriolanus, Richard II, King John, 2 Henry IV, Henry V, Julius Caesar, Othello, Timon of Athens and Macbeth.

  I was surprised to see the way he attempted to discredit these parallels: “in presuming that such patterns were self-evident in all these texts, none of these investigators offered a rationale for how their predecessors, who had also searched for the same patterns, had failed to find them.”

  This seems to be an argument that because everyone didn’t see everything all at once, nothing is really there. It is skepticism as a ravenous wolf devouring itself, one might say. One might also point out that a reprint of the manuscript of More was not widely available until relatively recently, and the fact that earlier commentators had not thoroughly scoured all Shakespeare and thus missed some parallels, however derelict this might make them, shouldn’t necessarily imply the parallels are false. The argument of one critic of the attribution cited by Werstine, MacDonald Jackson, that by 1985 there had been a “total absence of restraint” in finding further parallels to Hand D, may be just, but it does not necessarily entail that all parallels previously found are invalidated.

  I must admit I was curious about this section of Werstine’s paper since I’d always admired his skeptical restraint, always found the logical discipline of his argumentation so impressive. Here, however, with his attack on the Hand D thematic arguments, he seemed to skip a step or two in his eagerness to dismiss them.

  For instance Werstine proceeds from MacDonald Jackson’s objection to a bald assertion that “Shakespeareans do not seem to have noticed how they have knocked out all the support for Hand D’s identification of Shakespeare” (italics mine). But he has not demonstrated this is true. He has shown that the support on the grounds of handwriting and spelling is weak and inadequate. But he has not demonstrated to my satisfaction that support on thematic and stylistic grounds has been “knocked out” by his quibble over “cannibalism,” or the assertion that too many thematic parallels have be
en made.

  He repeats this overstatement a few pages later, after scolding Honigmann over the Judean/Indian issue. Honigmann makes judgments based on Hand D “even after Shakespeareans have lost confidence in each kind of evidence … for the identification of Hand D as Shakespeare.” But saying “Shakespeareans” he implies, without evidence, that all Shakespeareans have lost confidence in each kind of evidence, which is not the case. And he concludes by saying “all” the evidence “has been dismissed as inconclusive by Shakespeareans themselves.”

  Saying this three times does not make it true. I wondered what the source of this curious illogical animus on the part of the brilliant skeptical analyst of illogical agendas might be.

  I began to get a hint of the frustration behind Werstine’s uncharacteristic hyperassertiveness on Hand D when I spent an hour or so on the phone with him after reading his Hand D paper. He is, in person and on the phone, such a low-key, self-effacing, just-the-facts-ma’am sort of fellow that sometimes it’s hard to connect this persona with the polemicist who becomes a sort of demon barber with Ockham’s razor in his hand in his textual-skeptical prose.

  But I sensed, as well, that his has been, in some ways, a thankless task. I mean I’m thankful for his work, but it’s thankless in the sense that telling people we don’t have the Answer, without offering a substitute Answer, by emphasizing all we do not know—rather than the little we can say with confidence we do know—about the heart of Shakespeare’s mystery, is not felt as a comforting thing by many who would prefer not to live with uncertainty. Werstine was paying the price for the integrity of his negative capability: there was just so much supposition passing for truth out there in Shakespeare studies, he told me. So much supposition, so little time, so hard to scotch the snake(s).

  One way of defining Werstine’s role in Shakespearean controversy—and the controversy over what we call “Shakespearean”—can be found in a story he told me about meeting Harold Jenkins, the legendary editor of the 1982 second Arden Hamlet, one of the last avatars of the achievements and flaws of the twentieth-century school of Shakespearean textual scholarship known as the New Bibliography.