The Modern Editor’s Task

It will be clear from all this that the documents from which even the authoritative early editions of Shakespeare’s plays were printed were of a very variable nature. Some were his own papers in a rough state, including loose ends, duplications, inconsistencies, and vaguenesses. At the other extreme were theatre copies representing the play as close to the state in which it appeared in Shakespeare’s theatre as we can get; and there were various intermediate states. For those plays of which we have only one text—those first printed in the Folio, along with Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and Edward III-the editor is at least not faced with the problem of alternative choices. The surviving text of Macbeth gives every sign of being an adaptation: if so, there is no means of recovering what Shakespeare originally wrote. The scribe seems to have entirely expunged Shakespeare’s stage directions from The Two Gentlemen of Verona: we must make do with what we have. Other plays, however, confront the editor with a problem of choice. Pared down to its essentials, it is this: should readers be offered a text which is as close as possible to what Shakespeare originally wrote, or should the editor aim to formulate a text presenting the play as it appeared when performed by the company of which Shakespeare was a principal shareholder in the theatres that he helped to control and on whose success his livelihood depended? The problem exists in two different forms. For some plays, the changes made in the more theatrical text (always the Folio, if we discount the bad quartos) are relatively minor, consisting perhaps in a few reallocations of dialogue, the addition of music cues to the stage directions, and perhaps some cuts. So it is with, for example, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Richard II. More acute—and more critically exciting—are the problems raised when the more theatrical version appears to represent, not merely the text as originally written after it had been prepared for theatrical use, but a more radical revision of that text made (in some cases) after the first version had been presented in its own terms. At least five of Shakespeare’s plays exist in these states: they are 2 Henry IV, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, and King Lear.

The editorial problem is compounded by the existence of conflicting theories to explain the divergences between the surviving texts of these plays. Until recently, it was generally believed that the differences resulted from imperfect transmission: that Shakespeare wrote only one version of each play, and that each variant text represents that original text in a more or less corrupt form. As a consequence of this belief, editors conflated the texts, adding to one passages present only in the other, and selecting among variants in wording in an effort to present what the editor regarded as the most ‘Shakespearian’ version possible. Hamlet provides an example. The 1604 quarto was set from Shakespeare’s own papers (with some contamination from the reported text of 1603). The Folio includes about 80 lines that are not in the quarto, but omits about 23 that are there. The Folio was clearly influenced by, if not printed directly from, a theatre manuscript. There are hundreds of local variants. Editors have conflated the two texts, assuming that the absence of passages from each was the result either of accidental omission or of cuts made in the theatre against Shakespeare’s wishes; they have also rejected a selection of the variant readings. It is at least arguable that this produces a version that never existed in Shakespeare’s time. We believe that the 1604 quarto represents the play as Shakespeare first wrote it, before it was performed, and that the Folio represents a theatrical text of the play after he had revised it. Given this belief, it would be equally logical to base an edition on either text: one the more literary, the other the more theatrical. Both types of edition would be of interest; each would present within its proper context readings which editors who conflate the texts have to abandon.

It would be extravagant in a one-volume edition to present double texts of all the plays that exist in significantly variant form. The theatrical version is, inevitably, that which comes closest to the ‘final’ version of the play. We have ample testimony from the theatre at all periods, including our own, that play scripts undergo a process of, often, considerable modification on their way from the writing table to the stage. Occasionally, dramatists resent this process; we know that some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries resented cuts made in some of their plays. But we know too that plays may be much improved by intelligent cutting, and that dramatists of great literary talent may benefit from the discipline of the theatre. It is, of course, possible that Shakespeare’s colleagues occasionally overruled him, forcing him to omit cherished lines, or that practical circumstances—such as the incapacity of a particular actor to do justice to every aspect of his role—necessitated adjustments that Shakespeare would have preferred not to make. But he was himself, supremely, a man of the theatre. We have seen that he displayed no interest in how his plays were printed: in this he is at the opposite extreme from Ben Jonson, who was still in mid-career when he prepared the collected edition of his works. We know that Shakespeare was an actor and shareholder in the leading theatre company of its time, a major financial asset to that company, a man immersed in the life of that theatre and committed to its values. The concept of the director of a play did not exist in his time; but someone must have exercised some, at least, of the functions of the modern director, and there is good reason to believe that that person must have been Shakespeare himself, for his own plays. The very fact that those texts of his plays that contain cuts also give evidence of more ‘literary’ revision suggests that he was deeply involved in the process by which his plays came to be modified in performance. For these reasons, this edition chooses, when possible, to print the more theatrical version of each play. In some cases, this requires the omission from the body of the text of lines that Shakespeare certainly wrote; there is, of course, no suggestion that these lines are unworthy of their author; merely that, in some if not all performances, he and his company found that the play’s overall structure and pace were better without them. All such lines are printed as Additional Passages at the end of the play.

In all but one of Shakespeare’s plays the revisions are local—changes in the wording of individual phrases and lines—or else they are effected by additions and cuts. Essentially, then, the story line is not affected. But in King Lear the differences between the two texts are more radical. It is not simply that the 1608 quarto lacks over 100 lines that are in the Folio, or that the Folio lacks close on 300 lines that are in the Quarto, or that there are over 850 verbal variants, or that several speeches are assigned to different speakers. It is rather that the sum total of these differences amounts, in this play, to a substantial shift in the presentation and interpretation of the underlying action. The differences are particularly apparent in the military action of the last two acts. We believe, in short, that there are two distinct plays of King Lear, not merely two different texts of the same play; so we print edited versions of both the Quarto (‘The History of ...’) and the Folio (‘The Tragedy of...’).

Though the editor’s selection, when choice is available, of the edition that should form the basis of the edited text is fundamentally important, many other tasks remain. Elizabethan printers could do meticulously scholarly work, but they rarely expended their best efforts on plays, which—at least in quarto format—they treated as ephemeral publications. Moreover, dramatic manuscripts and heavily annotated quartos must have set them difficult problems. Scribal transcripts would have been easier for the printer, but scribes were themselves liable to introduce error in copying difficult manuscripts, and also had a habit of sophisticating what they copied—for example, by expanding colloquial contractions—in ways that would distort the dramatist’s intentions. On the whole, the Folio is a rather well-printed volume; there are not a great many obvious misprints; but for all that, corruption is often discernible. A few quartos—notably A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600)—are exceptionally well printed, but others, such as the 1604 Hamlet, abound in obvious error, which is a sure sign that they also commit hidden corruptions. Generations of editors have tried to correct the texts; but possible corruptions are still being identified, and new attempts at correction are often made. The preparation of this edition has required a minutely detailed examination of the early texts. At many points we have adopted emendations suggested by previous editors; at other points we offer original readings; and occasionally we revert to the original text at points where it has often been emended.