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Shakespeare
& Text
John Jowett
Oxford Shakespeare Topics Oxford: University Press, (Revised Edition
[First, 2007]) 2019 Paperback. ix+249 p. ISBN 978-0198827566.
£16.99
Reviewed by Sophie Chiari Université Clermont Auvergne (Clermont-Ferrand)
The author of Shakespeare
& Text, John Jowett is currently Professor of Shakespeare Studies and
Deputy Director at The Shakespeare Institute (University of Birmingham). This
new, revised edition, which obviously builds on Jowett’s research for the New
Oxford Shakespeare, explores the rich and complex field of Shakespeare textual
studies and provides us with a comprehensive and synthetic survey of the topic.
It is conveniently divided into eight well-balanced chapters and, in addition, it
includes two enlightening appendices (the first presenting a passage from Hamlet
as printed in Q1, Q2 and F1, and the second informing the reader of the
early editions and manuscripts of Shakespeare’s plays and poems). A ‘Glossary
of Key Terms’ will duly reassure the lay reader and enable him/her to acquire
some basic knowledge regarding conflation, dittography (i.e. ‘[t]he error of writing twice the same letter(s)’ [208]), or
foul papers for example. Of course, at the very end, Jowett also supplies some
carefully selected—hence helpful—bibliographical references in the fields of manuscript
studies, of early modern printing, of editorial theory and of digital
humanities. Clearly
written and informative from beginning to end, let us say right from the start
that Shakespeare & Text poses no major obstacle for the general
reader even though it sometimes addresses fairly technical issues. The author
explains, in a concise introduction, that ‘no manuscripts of Shakespeare’s
plays survive either from the theater or in his hand’ [4] with the notable
exception of a passage in Sir Thomas More, called the ‘Hand D’ section
of the manuscript, which focuses on the xenophobic riots that took place in
London. Paradoxically, today, we continue to read the poet and playwright even
more than ever before. As a result, detailed attention must be paid to the book
industry of his time (which promoted anonymity and collaboration altogether) if
we want to fully understand ‘the nature of Shakespeare as writer’ [5].
Shakespeare, Jowett then reminds us, was the sharer and chief dramatist of the
Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a playing company founded in 1594 and which became the
King’s Men in 1603. We do not really know what he thought of publication
(critics such as Lukas Erne* argue that Shakespeare did produce reading texts
for the page, and not just dramatic texts for the stage) but the fact is that
he was ‘an institutionalized authorial figure in its very earliest
manifestations’ [14]. Jowett not
only insists on Shakespeare as author, but also a co-author whose texts were
constantly revised. He was an active collaborating writer early in his career
(he definitely had a hand in Arden of Faversham, 2 Henry VI, 3
Henry VI, Titus Andronicus, and Edward III for example), but
his collaborations dwindled from 1594 to 1612. At the very end of his career
however, he renewed with this practice and co-wrote Henry VIII and The
Two Noble Kinsmen with the young John Fletcher—not to mention the lost work Cardenio.
All of his plays, whether composed sole-handedly or not, required licensing
and, therefore, had to be approved by the Master of the Revels. If and when
they were printed, ‘the printer chosen by the publisher would provide an
estimate of the number of sheets required for the book’ [54] and would thus
‘cast off the copy’ (ibid.)—a process
which entailed frequent mistakes, not always duly corrected by the compositor.
These corrections, Jowett points out, sometimes caused notorious cruces which still
cause major disagreements today among Shakespeare’s critics. It was the
First Folio which significantly challenged previous editing habits and
assumptions. The first edition of Shakespeare’s plays (which excluded the
poems) was the work of John Heminges and Henry Condell, both members of the
King’s Men, and it was all the more important as sixteen of the plays included in
it had never appeared in print before 1623. What is more, the Folio introduced
additional changes in the playtexts, and Jowett quotes significant examples
from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Richard II. The first edited
collection of Shakespeare’s plays therefore offers us a ‘different Shakespeare,
allowing us often to compare one form of a play with another’ [89]. Jowett then
addresses the ‘Mapping’ of the Shakespearean text in his fifth chapter [99] and
reminds us of the influence of the New Bibliographers who dominated the
twentieth-century approaches to the playwright, and for whom ‘it was important
to analyse the individual text not in isolation but in relation to a general
description of the genesis and evolution of the Shakespeare text’ [99]. The
period of the New Bibliography also established ‘bad’ and ‘good’ folios, the ‘bad’
ones being those thought to be affected by approximative memorial
reconstruction. By the 1990s, the New Bibliography had seriously declined, but
the caricatural polarisation of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ texts remained—Hamlet
being a case in point with its Q1, Q2 and F1 versions, the Q1 text being far shorter
than the other ones. Hamlet is no exception however, since ‘quartos
thought to be close to Shakespeare’s hand are arguably more affected by
transcription and annotation than used to be assumed’, Jowett argues [111].
This leads him to address the issue of textual emendation, an editorial
practice which aims at correcting errors and which has now been widely accepted
by editors and readers alike. Conjectural emendations, i.e. those ‘initiated by editors without the testimony of an early
text’ [127], are probably the most challenging ones. Lewis Theobald’s ‘a babbled
of green fields’, in a passage from Henry V where the Hostess relates
the death of Falstaff, is one of the most widely discussed emendations of the
canon for example. The Folio notoriously reads ‘a Table of greene fields’,
which does not seem to make much sense. Yet it is hard to know what the
playwright meant exactly and we will probably never find his original meaning. Other
possible emendations may concern the distinction between prose and verse.
Indeed, because ‘the opening words of verse-lines were not usually capitalized’
in play manuscripts [135], Jowett explains, the difference between the two was
not an easy one to make for the compositor. It would be
wrong to limit editorial practice to textual emendation, however. Jowett shows
that the modernisation of spelling and punctuation, as well as the addition of
stage directions, are both part of the editor’s work. Spelling variants make
the Shakespearean text notoriously unstable: the word ‘sonne’, for example,
could either refer to ‘son’ or to ‘sun’. In the famous opening lines of Richard
III which allude to ‘this son of York’, both meanings are present, yet the
editor can only retain one. Regarding stage directions, Jowett makes clear that
‘[t]he idiosyncratic and the particular in the wording of original stage
directions are almost always preserved’ [149], yet in the case of ‘permissive
stage directions’ (ibid.), which happen to be particularly vague, the
editor may choose to provide details reflecting his/her understanding of the
stage business. This second
edition of Jowett’s book would not have been complete without a last chapter
exclusively devoted to ‘The Digital Text’ [157], which takes into account the
digital revolution that allows Shakespeare’s plays and poems to become even
more accessible worldwide. A digital edition is much more than a simple
scholarly edition, Jowett insists: It will be critical, in the sense of reflecting an evaluation of the
original documents on which it is based. It will be designed to facilitate the
user’s access to and understanding of the text. It might be part of a larger
project, as when a marked-up digital text is hyperlinked to a recorded live
performance. [169] These new
developments undoubtedly give some added value to the plays and poems: because
it is now possible to introduce audio or video recordings when need be,
Shakespeare’s text becomes fully alive and more resonant than ever in our
multimedia society. Digital editions, therefore, contribute to renew our
interest in Shakespeare: not only do they accommodate a variety of different
texts as well as a ‘large array of data’ [174], but they also reach out to a
wide variety of readers who, so far, could hardly deal with the ambiguities so
characteristic of early modern texts in general. Emphasising
the multifaceted nature of the Shakespearean text, this book written by a
leading expert in the field proves both illuminating and useful, and offers
valuable insights into early modern editions as well as modern printed and
digital ones. While it will be most helpful to students interested in
Shakespeare and in textual studies—especially to post-graduate students specialising
in the early modern period—it will also provide the general readers with
much-needed clarifications on the authorship of Shakespeare’s texts thanks to
contextually-based examples. _ *Erne, Lukas. Shakespeare
as Literary Dramatist. Cambridge: University Press, 2016 (Second Edition
[First, 2003]), 2013.
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