The Shakespeare Wars Page 8

  The future is now and Stanley Wells was still not sure, when I spoke to him, that the time is right to divide Hamlet. One afternoon in London over tea in Mayfair he told me he felt that the multiplication of multiple-text editions “might be misleading” to a bewildered public.

  But it’s happening, and Gary Taylor thinks the Arden decision a vindication of his position, a signal of the victory of the “palace coup.” “It’s a revolution that has already happened, fully in place and institutionalized within the intellectual community, but one that hadn’t yet reached the wider world in terms of what it’s changed.”

  His triumphalism may be premature. The War may not be over. The partisans of the Lost Archetype are not ready to surrender. Frank Kermode, for one, is not. In a powerfully argued attack on the theory delivered to the British Academy in 1994 entitled “Disintegration Once Again,” Kermode, perhaps the preeminent British Shakespeare critic (his edition of the Arden Tempest is considered a classic and he recently published his reflections on the evolution of Shakespeare’s verbal style in Shakespeare’s Language), links the Dividers and Revisers of today to the “disintegrators,” the earlier twentieth-century movement in Shakespeare scholarship which professed to find different “hands,” ever-multiplying collaborators in many of Shakespeare’s plays. (A position that has acquired more selective and credible support in Brian Vickers’s 2005 Shakespeare: Co-Author.)

  To “the new disintegrators,” as Kermode called Taylor and his allies, “the disintegration of the texts is part of a larger effort to disintegrate their author, or at any rate to demolish the idolatrous image that over the past couple of hundred years—so it is claimed—has been erected by editors and critics alike in place of a Shakespeare they can see no reason to think worthy of such an apotheosis.”

  For Kermode then, the Dividers are motivated by the theoretical ideologies of postmodernism, but his argument against them does not depend on a disdain for their theory but rather a refutation of their evidence and argument. He gets deeply into the matrix and texture of the variants in the Lear texts to argue that close reading confirms the strength of the case for a Lost Archetype.

  He cites several passages in act 1, scene 1 of Lear, for instance, that indicate, he believes, that each version was based on a Lost Archetype and suggests that “the collapsed archetype [theory should be] shored up” once again.

  Few came forward to shore up Kermode’s argument until six years later when a powerful case against Gary Taylor’s original thesis on “The War in King Lear” appeared in the International Shakespeare Yearbook. It was by Richard Knowles, editor of the forthcoming Modern Language Association’s variorum edition of Lear. Knowles calls Gary Taylor’s “War in King Lear” essay “a manifesto and a salvo,” picking up on its martial spirit, but then salvoes back with a remarkably stark counterblast: “The confident claim of radical differences between Quarto and Folio in [Taylor’s] much cited essay, when they are seen against the total evidence of those texts, proves in virtually every instance to be without substance.”

  Knowles doesn’t just disagree, then, he wants to blow Taylor’s argument off the map: Taylor’s arguments for a revised Lear, he says, “depend on over-literal interpretation of some variant stage directions … and in some cases these claims even invoke false, non-existent or invented evidence.”

  A declaration of war! An attempted coup against the “palace coup.”

  When I faxed Knowles’s blast to Kermode, he faxed me back to express great pleasure that someone had taken up the Lost Archetype cause, and added, “The Taylorites still must reply to my evidence from Act I, Scene 1.” Approaching Lear’s age Frank Kermode is, far more vigorously than the aging king, trying to hold Lear’s kingdom together.

  In America Richard Knowles has been counterattacking since 1985, earning a counter-counterattack from Taylor as an exemplum of “The Rhetoric of Reaction.”

  The warlike fractiousness of the scholars and the sometimes personal tone it takes should not obscure, however, the issue at stake in the war over the texts of Lear and Hamlet: In what ways do the differences make the two variations different works of art? And how much did Shakespeare himself want to make them different works of art? To some the question is even more fraught with significance for Hamlet than for Lear.

  As Paul Werstine, one of the most stringently skeptical scholarly observers of the textual wars, has argued, “Those who object to the argument for the revision of Lear on the grounds that Shakespeare wouldn’t have revised his play merely to change the nature of some secondary characters, need to recognize that the change between the Quarto and Folio Hamlet is a change in the role of the main character, Hamlet himself.” I would, and will in chapter 4, argue that the variation in Lear’s last words in the two texts is as great a change, as great an issue “in the role of the main character” as any change in Hamlet with perhaps one exception—Hamlet’s last soliloquy, the “How all occasions do inform against me …” soliloquy, present in the Quarto but cut from the Folio.

  Gary Taylor stresses that the omission of Hamlet’s final soliloquy from the fourth act makes the Folio a different play. The soliloquies define Hamlet after all, and they are at the very heart of the grandiose claims Harold Bloom has made for Hamlet: that it is in these soliloquies that Shakespeare “invented” a new kind of consciousness in Western culture, a meditative, reflective self consciousness. And it is in that final soliloquy (at least in the Good Quarto) that Hamlet has his last chance to reflect on the questions of revenge, delay, on the question of self-consciousness itself (the phrase “some craven scruple/Of thinking too precisely on th’ event” which appears in that soliloquy might be an instance not of self-consciousness but of something more complex: self-conscious self-consciousness, meta self-consciousness).

  The placement of that fourth-act soliloquy has aroused much debate about its significance. Recall that it takes place during the time Hamlet is being dragged off to the ship that is supposed to take him to enforced exile (and planned murder) in England. As he crosses the darkling coastal plains, he sees Fortinbras’s troops, led by the ever-decisive, ever-on-the-move Norwegian prince, here leading his ignorant army in transit across Denmark to attack Poland.

  It’s a spectacle, the prospect of someone cheerfully risking thousands of deaths in quarrel “for an egg-shell,” that causes Hamlet to reconsider his own self-loathing indecisiveness, his failure to revenge his father’s death on Claudius, whom he could have slain at prayer after he’d caught “the conscience of the King” in the Mousetrap play.

  “How all occasions do inform against me …” Hamlet begins, seeing the bold Fortinbras as a reproach to his own “thinking too precisely.”

  “Rightly to be great,” he says, “Is not to stir without great argument,/But greatly to find quarrel in a straw …”

  He already has great argument, his father’s murder, he insists to himself, and so “from this time forth,/My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!”

  There has been bitter division over the function and necessity of this soliloquy. Some argue that it deserved to be cut from the Quarto because it’s repetition: Hamlet going over the same old self-reproachful ground, while others have maintained that the very fact that Hamlet obsessively returns to “thinking too precisely” about “thinking too precisely” is precisely why it’s important as the final instance of Hamlet’s self-definition. That his return to the revenge/delay dynamic raises it to a defining moment of his character and the play.

  “More than most of Shakespeare’s plays,” Gary Taylor tells me, “Hamlet is dominated by a single theme. And therefore, the question of whether or not he has that soliloquy in the fourth act does make a considerable difference to your interpretation of the role and therefore the play. I mean Branagh’s Hamlet would have been much better if he’d cut that.” It’s very much in fashion among the more fervid of the revisionists to insist not only that all revisions were by Shakespeare but that all revisions (such as cutting the last soli
loquy) were brilliant “Shakespearean” decisions (rather than those of a theater manager). John Jones argues that case in Shakespeare at Work in 1995 and James Shapiro argues it again in his book 1599, published in 2005).

  As many times as it’s made, reiteration of this assertion on various grounds is no substitute for proof. Taylor has a more subtle analysis of the differences: another level of difference between the two Hamlets and the conflated text, he argues, has to do with pacing and time:

  “One’s experience of a work of art is different depending upon how it manipulates time. And therefore what people dismissively refer to as ‘theatrical cutting’ [in the shorter Folio version] very often is, it seems to me, about the manipulation of time. And that is something people in the theater know experientially, intuitively and practically—from seeing what works and what doesn’t work in front of audiences. And Shakespeare’s very good at this, knowing when your audience is going to start to get restless, it doesn’t matter how beautiful the poetry is. Timing, Timing, Timing. Knowing how to shape time is a crucial part of the art. Whether it makes a difference to the meaning of Hamlet, it makes a difference to the experience of Hamlet as temporal art form.

  “The whole thing of time and the control of time is important. And then you can make an argument about time being important to the story that Hamlet has to tell, as well. Hamlet is the longest play in the Shakespeare canon; it’s one of the longest plays in the Western canon, and it takes all that length of time for Hamlet to do it, so what’s the justification for this extraordinary long-windedness on Shakespeare’s part? Well, the justification for it must be it’s a play about somebody who can’t finish something, instead of a play about Shakespeare not being able to finish something, or not being able to shut up. And the duration becomes an issue. It makes a difference how long something is.”

  While Taylor feels the Arden decision to do a divided Hamlet is a vindication of his anti-conflationist approach, he claims to have withdrawn from the Hamlet wars. Moved on to another battle front where, I later learned, he is preparing another surprise flanking attack, actually more of a wholesale invasion and seizure of the Shakespeare canon. Word of this rather shocking new development, not then known to the world, reached me when I was interviewing a scholar at Merton College, Oxford, named Tiffany Stern, author of Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan, which offers an important new critique of the “memorial reconstruction” theory of the Bad Quarto, the third text in the forthcoming Arden tripartite Hamlet. Ms. Stern confided to me, in an amusedly scandalized tone, that she’d heard that Gary Taylor was planning a grand raid on the Shakespeare canon on behalf of Thomas Middleton, a dramatist contemporary of Shakespeare best known for The Revenger’s Tragedy and The Changeling. Taylor has been engaged in producing an edition of the complete works of Middleton, and he’s argued in the Times Literary Supplement that Middleton is, at the very least, Shakespeare’s equal as a dramatist, neglected only because Shakespeare happened to be the one chosen by the ruling hegemony of British culture as an icon of its imperial ideology.

  But now he’s gone further than that. Someone in the know at the Merton College Fellows high table confirmed to Ms. Stern and me this latest dispatch from the battlefield: Gary Taylor had decided to include in his complete edition of Middleton four plays usually attributed to Shakespeare: Macbeth, Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens, and Troilus and Cressida. While in the past some have argued that Middleton may have collaborated in some of them (the Hecate song in Macbeth appears in a Middleton play as well), including them in the Middleton canon will certainly be seen as a deliberate provocation, another front in Gary Taylor’s war against …

  Against what? Not Shakespeare, he insists, but what he regards as Shakespeare’s overblown mythic and transcendent reputation.

  It made me recall again Gary Taylor’s insistence to me that he doesn’t “hate Shakespeare.” It made me recall something else he said to me, specifically about Hamlet. He’d been telling me about various productions of Hamlet he’d seen over the years. His favorite was the furiously eccentric Steven Berkoff production, in London, “that was most notorious for the bedroom scene in which Hamlet fucked Gertrude. When you speak of it in those terms,” he added, “it sounds wild and crazy but in context it seemed perfectly natural.” But at another point he casually let drop that “it almost doesn’t matter what production, I always cry at the end of Hamlet.”

  Every Hamlet?

  “I always find myself choking up,” he said, adding, “I cry easily, I get this from my mother.”

  It could be said without too much exaggeration that if Gary Taylor cries at every Hamlet, there are a number of Hamlet scholars who cry at the mention of Gary Taylor. Certainly Harold Jenkins, the editor of the Arden Hamlet, the last Grand Unification Hamlet, the one about to be split in three by his own publisher, is one of them. He was on the verge of tears when he spoke to me about the coming disintegration of his life work.

  HAROLD JENKINS: DEATH BEFORE DISINTEGRATION

  Harold Jenkins was nearing ninety and physically a bit frail when I met with him at his shipshape little cottage in Finchley in London. Emotionally a bit frail as well; he’d just returned that week from his brother’s funeral.

  And as it turned out, it was just a year before his own death. But he could still summon vigor, passion and a touch of bitterness when it came to defending the integrity of his life’s work, the second Arden edition of Hamlet, the one he’d devoted nearly thirty years to compiling. A labor of a lifetime, a labor of love he fears will soon be lost when it will be superseded by the new Hamlet his own publisher is replacing his with. The new Hamlet that will pull apart, disentangle, disintegrate the fabric he’d labored to weave together. The fabric—the fabrication his critics would say—of a unified Hamlet, the conflated Lost Archetype Hamlet.

  I’m not sure if Jenkins was yet aware—few were—when I spoke to him of the radical surgery the new Arden Hamlet was about to perform on Jenkins’s conflated Hamlet. It wasn’t until a few days later I learned about it from the editors of that new Hamlet, Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. They had just made the decision themselves, and I’m not sure anyone had the heart to tell Harold Jenkins before he died.

  Still, despite disclaimers of having left the battle behind, Jenkins was still acutely aware of the polemics and counterpolemics that followed in the wake of the 1982 publication of his Arden edition of Hamlet. “I’ve been savagely attacked,” he said, his opponents have often been “venomous.” But he remained confident his achievement would last. And he was not alone in his belief.

  Thomas Pendleton, the judicious coeditor of The Shakespeare Newsletter, has suggested “it will remain a classic work, an astounding achievement that will serve readers for years to come.” Jenkins took much pleasure in pointing out to me that Harold Bloom, hanging judge of the Oxford Hamlet, had conspicuously chosen Jenkins’s Arden for all his citations from Hamlet in his best-selling Shakespeare book.

  A LOSS OF STARS

  Harold Jenkins’s lifelong closeness to Shakespeare began, he told me, with the fact they both grew up close to the trees and the stars.

  “I’m a country boy, Buckinghamshire, in the Midlands. And it was an essential part of my education in Shakespeare. When I think of the language with the buttercups and the lady’s-smocks and the marsh marigolds, these are things I was very familiar with as a child. I never see them now in London,” he lamented.

  He was a country boy, of course, made of sterner stuff than marsh marigolds. Like Shakespeare, he became a success in the metropolis: he was a country boy who rose to a position of unique preeminence at the apex of the demanding and exclusive profession of British literary scholarship, successor to J. Dover Wilson, one of the giants of twentieth-century Shakespeare scholarship, in the University of Edinburgh’s Chair of Rhetoric and English Literature, later to become general editor of the entire Arden edition of Shakespeare and editor of its centerpiece, the Arden Hamlet. Nonetheless, he said as he fixed tea, dap
per in a suit and bow tie, he still missed the landscape of marsh marigolds.

  “I don’t know when I’ve last seen the stars and when I’ve last heard the cuckoo. Whereas if you lived in the country, you were terribly aware of the stars.”

  Terribly aware of the stars. Terribly aware of their loss. It makes one think of how prominent a role stars play in Shakespeare, angry stars, fortune’s stars, the stars Juliet wants to cut Romeo up into and hang upon the night sky. The glowing carpet of stars Jessica and Lorenzo gaze at in the strange fifth act of The Merchant of Venice.

  Jenkins’s lament at the loss of stars evokes the characteristic elegiac gentility that inflects Harold Jenkins’s tone, an echo of loss. His friends say he never quite recovered from the loss of his wife of fifty years, struck by a motorbike shortly after his monumental lifework, his 608-page edition of Hamlet, was published in 1982. And now he knows his Hamlet itself, in effect, has been given a death sentence, its successor already in the works.

  Perhaps the best way of capturing Harold Jenkins’s achievement is to describe his life work as the Last Grand Unification Hamlet. The last heroic attempt to solve the problem of Hamlet texts, the problem of Shakespeare’s intentions for Hamlet, the problem of the score of large and hundreds of small but significant variations in the two major texts, by giving us a single Hamlet, a Hamlet that presents itself as the one true Hamlet, the closest it’s humanly possible to get to Shakespeare’s intended Hamlet.

  And perhaps the best way to capture Harold Jenkins’s despair at what is about to happen to his Hamlet is to record an exchange I had with him about that forthcoming successor edition.

  “I suspect I won’t like it,” he said. “I suspect it will take an anti-Jenkins position. But it doesn’t much matter. I’m ninety now, I don’t imagine I shall live to see it. And that I shall not regret.”