The Case for the First Folio

January 25, 2008 4:42 PM

The Case for the First Folio For centuries, editors of Shakespeare's plays have conflated different published editions (quartos and folios) in an attempt to create one true text as the writer intended. In this essay (.pdf file) Jonathan Bate, one of the editors of The RSC Shakespeare makes the case that in fact what they're doing is editing together different drafts of the play originated by the bard at different times in his life attempting to make better dramatic sense. Essentially that none of the texts you studied at school are what Shakespeare intended to be performed at all.

It's a very long essay but there are many wonderful revelations; my favourite is probably that the popular girl's name Imogen is a textual error created by a compositor when putting together an edition of the play 'Cymbeline' having misread the double 'n' in Innogen, a character name which also turns up in Much Ado About Nothing. Sorry Imogens.

posted by feelinglistless (29 comments total)

PDF plus padding links?

Grumble.

(Article looks pretty good though.)
posted by klangklangston at 4:47 PM on January 25, 2008

It's a wonderful accident of history that the poet who has had the greatest canonical prestige in English literature since 1750 is also the one who left behind the most textually vexed corpus. Especially wonderful if it's in your interest for there always to be work for humanities professors.
posted by sy at 5:03 PM on January 25, 2008 [1 favorite]

Well I know, but I decided it was too good a piece of writing despite the format.
posted by feelinglistless at 5:03 PM on January 25, 2008

Well, what the fuck are we supposed to do, then???
posted by Henry C. Mabuse at 5:10 PM on January 25, 2008 [1 favorite]

textually vexed corpus
Try saying that five times fast.

Grumble.
If it's links you want, take a look at the BL's spectacular site on the quartos.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 5:12 PM on January 25, 2008

Well I know, but I decided it was too good a piece of writing despite the format.

All's well that's wendell.
posted by hal9k at 5:14 PM on January 25, 2008 [1 favorite]

But as is well known, William Shakespeare did not write the plays ascribed to him. They were created by a contemporary of his with exactly the same name.
posted by Hogshead at 5:32 PM on January 25, 2008 [3 favorites]

Kenneth Branagh's gonna be soooo pissed!
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 5:38 PM on January 25, 2008

Journeys end in folios redacting
Every wise man's son doth know.
posted by Astro Zombie at 5:38 PM on January 25, 2008 [1 favorite]

I learned this as a college junior, so I think Branagh's in the know. Most conflated editions have footnotes to the quarto and folio changes just so everyone knows what's happening.


Great article though.
posted by Avenger50 at 5:46 PM on January 25, 2008

Wait, so Romeo + Juliet isn't set in Miami Beach?
posted by infinitewindow at 5:52 PM on January 25, 2008 [4 favorites]

Yeah, very interesting stuff, but more of a recap of the last few years of textual criticism rather than a cutting edge argument. (but, IANAEditor)

He sort of implies it, but I'll state it out: The Oxford editors made a very odd, and probably very stupid, choice in changing Falstaff's name "back" to Oldcastle, but thankfully most everyone else doesn't do that.

Also, any good edition (Riverside, Norton, Arden) will have an explanation of its editorial method and a compilation of variants. Norton even goes so far as to have 3 versions of Lear in their collected edition: Quarto, Folio, and Conflated.
posted by papakwanz at 5:53 PM on January 25, 2008

Essentially that none of the texts you studied at school are what Shakespeare intended to be performed at all.

At least we can safely say that no one edited this sentence. Unless Shakespeare rose from the dead and redacted its verb.
posted by Hildegarde at 6:07 PM on January 25, 2008 [1 favorite]

"It's a very long essay but there are many wonderful revelations..."

Lemme know when they adapt it to film.

"Essentially that none of the texts you studied at school are what Shakespeare intended to be performed at all."

What? Did we use too many ninjas and robots? Hey. I was just the stage manager. Not my fault!
posted by ZachsMind at 6:19 PM on January 25, 2008 [1 favorite]

The Comedy of Errors.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 7:19 PM on January 25, 2008 [1 favorite]

"Essentially that none of the texts you studied at school are what Shakespeare intended to be performed at all."

Whenever Shakespeare is performed you can be sure one of the first questions that was asked was, "What are we going to cut?"

Everything stays the same.
posted by pointilist at 7:49 PM on January 25, 2008

The Error of Comedies.
posted by winston at 7:50 PM on January 25, 2008 [1 favorite]

what the hell is wrong with PDF files? The point is, it's on the web and it's good.
posted by Rumple at 8:35 PM on January 25, 2008

You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.
posted by meehawl at 10:28 PM on January 25, 2008

A fascinating article, and (to me, at least) quite persuasive. I may have to go buy this edition sometime.
posted by eritain at 12:15 AM on January 26, 2008

Michael Dobson wrote a rather devastating review of the RSC Shakespeare in the LRB, pointing out that the Folio texts of the plays, unlike the earlier quartos, were subjected to religious censorship in the form of the 1606 Act to Restrain Abuses of Players. This means that all the swear-words are cut out, so that instead of saying 'Oh God!' or 'God's wounds!', Hamlet has to say 'Oh heavens!' We can be fairly sure that Shakespeare would not have been overjoyed about this -- though Dobson wryly suggests that it 'may improve this edition's chances of becoming the set text at small Baptist colleges in the Bible Belt'.
posted by verstegan at 12:16 AM on January 26, 2008 [1 favorite]

Master Bate's blog is good reading, though, if you're interested in following up some of the issues raised by the RSC edition.
posted by verstegan at 12:20 AM on January 26, 2008

verstegan: True, although there is very much the prevailing argument in the actual book that what they're trying to do is edit the Folio as is, preserving (though modernizing) the plays in that form. Other versions of the complete works are available.
posted by feelinglistless at 2:36 AM on January 26, 2008

Whenever Shakespeare is performed you can be sure one of the first questions that was asked was, "What are we going to cut?"

Not in my company. When we performed "Winter's Tale," I think we cut one line (that we had to cut, because it described something we couldn't show on stage, or budget reasons).

When we performed "Much Ado," we didn't make any cuts. And it was a really interesting experience. All sorts of people said that our production was wildly different from any other they had seen -- that it was much more weighty. "I always thought this was a light comedy, but there's much more to it!"

I couldn't figure out what they were talking about. I didn't try to make it more weighty. I just had my actors perform what's in the text. Finally, I realized it's the Friar's speech. It's several pages long, it's brilliant, and it's dead serious. Beatrice isn't in on stage; Benedict is, but he hardly talks. People often cut it, because they want to turn "Much Ado" into the Beatrice & Benedict show. But when you leave it in, the play is much more nuanced.
posted by grumblebee at 7:03 AM on January 26, 2008

grumblebee: Yes, one of the reasons I am not a fan of 'Much Ado' is because most productions of it turn it LAME. The play itself is wonderful, the rom-com versions that get performed, not so much.

Re: 'Winter's Tale' -- Please tell me that you didn't cut the bear!!!
posted by papakwanz at 8:49 AM on January 26, 2008

I've wondered what the uncut versions have in common with leaving in all the repeats in classical music. Getting paid by the minute, wanting the premiere to be substantial, but knowing the pieces still work without them for some audiences.
posted by StickyCarpet at 9:52 AM on January 26, 2008

Re: 'Winter's Tale' -- Please tell me that you didn't cut the bear!!!

No, I didn't, but there's a funny (in retrospect) story about this: my company stages plays with actors on a bare stage. Our goal is to tell stories compellingly, using just voices, bodies and text. We don't use sets, lighting changes, etc. The actors just wear their street clothes. We also don't do any high-concept stuff (unless you consider the lack of high concept a high concept). No "Hamlet" on the moon or "Macbeth" set in Iraq.

But that does make stuff like the "Winter's Tale" bear challenging. How do you create a bear with no bear costume, no special effects, etc? Sure, you can have an actor act like a bear, and it is a comic moment in the play, but I wanted the audience to laugh with us, not at us.

We explored various options, such as doing that moment in the dark, using just sound effects. But I wasn't crazy about those ideas. Most of them, while interesting, would have been confusing. (Why are the lights out? What's that growling?)

Others were too cool. I have an anti-cool rule in my company, which is often hard to follow. Sometimes we come up with a really spectacular way of presenting a moment, using bodies: actors acrobatically morph themselves into a castle or whatever. But when this happens, I worry that the audience will think, "That was SO cool how those actors created a castle out of nothing!" At which point they'll be thinking about our coolness, rather than about the story. And for me, it's all about serving the story. I don't want to do anything that distracts from that, even if the distraction is entertaining. ("Kill all your darlings.")

Anyway: it's a bit hard to describe our bear solution. It involved the whole company playing dangerous forest creatures. The surrounded the character that gets "pursued by a bear," moved menacingly around him, making growls and grrrs. Eventually they closed in on him, while he screamed.

We worked really hard on it, trying to get the right balance of sound and movement -- not too silly, etc. In the end, I thought it worked okay. I had a nagging feeling -- and I still have it -- that we didn't find the perfect solution for our aesthetic, but that the solution we found was good enough. It's just one moment in the story, and it's not a terribly interesting moment to me. We moved on.

When I would tell people I was directing "Winter's Tale," they all asked, "How are you going to do the bear?" I know this is a famous moment in the play, but when you get into the story, it really is a relatively minor event (in a play about jealousy, loss, redemption, abandonment, etc.) I longed to talk about something else. So I would just say, "I staged it in the simplest way I could..."

About a week before we opened, I went to see another production of the play. This production was different from ours in a number of key ways, but it was similar in its minimalism. They didn't push it as far as we do, but, like us, they didn't have sets or special effects. When the bear part came, I noticed they did it in a similar way to us (using the whole company, surrounding the chased guy). I didn't think much about it. It made since. Given the same problem to solve and the same "tools" to solve it with (actors on a bare stage), they had come up with the same solution.

After the play, I got into a fun discussion with the director. I invited her to come see my version, and she said she would.

In fact, she came opening night. And after our performance, which was well received, she demanded to talk to me. To my astonishment, she yelled at me for twenty minutes. She accused me of stealing her bear idea. I absolutely couldn't convince her that we'd completely staged that scene weeks before I saw her production. She felt, even if I was telling the truth, that I should have changed it after seeing her staging.

At one point during the argument, I said a really stupid -- but true -- thing. I asked her why I would steal a moment that I wasn't even all that proud of. To me, as I said earlier, our bear was a flawed -- but not seriously flawed -- solution. It was the best I could do, but it wasn't brilliant. She thought otherwise about her, similar solution. She thought it was clever and creative. I realized then, that she was immensely proud of her bear idea.

Like me, she had been asked over and over again, "How are you going to do the bear?" I imagine that she'd wink and say, "Why don't you come see my show and find out!" She and I were so different. I was bored by the bear and wanted to simply tell that part of the story and move on; she wanted to prove her skills as a director. I insulted her by first "stealing" her idea and then claiming it wasn't even all that good of an idea.

To end the argument, I offered to list her in the program as "Bear Director," which I secretly thought would be really funny. I guess she felt like that was an admission of guilt from me, and that's what she wanted, so she calmed down and left me alone.
posted by grumblebee at 11:08 AM on January 26, 2008 [3 favorites]

Oh, I just looked at the play and remembered the cut we made. Turns out, it's little more than the one line I claimed it was, above (it was a long time ago).

Here's the original:

SERVANT.
Master, there is three carters, three shepherds, three neat-herds, three swineherds, that have made themselves all men of hair; they call themselves Saltiers, and they have dance
which the wenches say is a gallimaufry of gambols, because they are not in't; but they themselves are o' th' mind, if it be not too rough for some that know little but bowling, it will please plentifully.

SHEPHERD. Away! We'll none on't; here has been too much homely foolery already. I know, sir, we weary you.

POLIXENES. You weary those that refresh us. Pray, let's see these four threes of herdsmen.

SERVANT. One three of them, by their own report, sir, hath danc'd before the King; and not the worst of the three but jumps twelve foot and a half by th' squier.

SHEPHERD. Leave your prating; since these good men are pleas'd, let them come in; but quickly now.

SERVANT. Why, they stay at door, sir. Exit

Here a dance of twelve SATYRS

POLIXENES. [To SHEPHERD] O, father, you'll know more of that hereafter.

We didn't have enough actors to for twelve satyrs. We could have doubled the actors that we did have, but they were all already on stage at this moment, playing their main characters. Even so, we could have come up with some sort of non-realistic device, in which they stopped playing their main characters, became the dancers, and then resumed their main roles.

To me, this didn't seem worth doing. It would be complicated and confusing, and in my view, the main function of the dance was to add some revelry to the tale -- and we'd already done that in other ways. Do I cut as follows:

SERVANT.
Master, there is three carters, three shepherds, three neat-herds, three swineherds, that have made themselves all men of hair; they call themselves Saltiers, and they have dance
which the wenches say is a gallimaufry of gambols, because they are not in't; but they themselves are o' th' mind, if it be not too rough for some that know little but bowling, it will please plentifully. One three of them, by their own report, sir, hath danc'd before the King; and not the worst of the three but jumps twelve foot and a half by th' squier.

SHEPHERD. Away! We'll none on't; here has been too much homely foolery already. I know, sir, we weary you.

SERVANT. Exit

POLIXENES. [To SHEPHERD] O, father, you'll know more of that hereafter.
posted by grumblebee at 11:20 AM on January 26, 2008

verstegan: pointing out that the Folio texts of the plays, unlike the earlier quartos, were subjected to religious censorship

You, er, didn't happen to read the link, did you? The first one? It, ah ... sort of ... mentions that.
posted by eritain at 4:41 PM on January 30, 2008