MYRIAD-MINDED SHAKESPEARE

Also by E. A. f. Honigmann

THE STABILITY OF SHAKESPEARE'S TEXT

SHAKESPEARE: Seven Tragedies- The Dramatist's Manipulation of Response

SHAKESPEARE'S IMPACT ON HIS CONTEMPORARIES

SHAKESPEARE: The 'Lost Years'

JOHN WEEVER: A Biography of a Literary Associate of Shakespeare and Jonson

THE TEXTS OF OTHELLO AND SHAKESPEARIAN REVISION

KING JOHN (editor)

RICHARD III (editor)

TWELFTH NIGHT (editor)

MILTON'S SONNETS (editor)

PARADISE LOST, BOOK 10 (co-editor with C. A. Patrides)

SHAKESPEARE AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES: Essays in Comparison (editor)

PLAYHOUSE WILLS 1558-1642 (co-editor with Susan Brock)

OTHELLO (editor)

BRITISH ACADEMY SHAKESPEARE LECTURES 1980-89 (introduction)

Myriad-tninded Shakespeare

Essays on the tragedies, problem comedies and Shakespeare the man

E. A. J. Honigmann

Second Edition

Published in Great Britain by

MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-333-72064-6 ISBN 978-0-230-37413-3 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/9780230374133

Published in the United States of America by

ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010

ISBN 978-0-312-17753-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Honigmann, E. A. J. Myriad-minded Shakespeare : essays on the tragedies, problem comedies, and Shakespeare the man I E.A.J. Honigmann.- 2nd ed. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-17753-9 I. Shakespeare, William, 1564--1616-Tragedies. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564--1616-Tragicomedies. 3. Tragicomedy. 4. Tragedy. I. Title. PR2983.H627 1997 822.3'3-dc21 97-26827

© E. A. J. Honigmann 1989. 1998

First edition 1989 Second edition 1998

CIP

All rights reserved. No reproduction. copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Totten ham Court Road, London WI P 9HE.

Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources.

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3 2 I 00 99 98

Contents

Acknowledgements vi

Note on texts and references vii

Bibliographical note viii

Preface to the Second Edition x

Introduction: Myriad-minded Shakespeare and the modern reader 1

1 In search of William Shakespeare: the public and the private man 4

2 Politics, rhetoric and will-power in Julius Caesar 21

3 The politics in Hamlet and 'the world of the play' 43

4 Trends in the discussion of Shakespeare's characters: 0~~0 w

5 The uniqueness of King Lear: genre and production p~~~ ~

6 Past, present and future in Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra 93

7 Shakespeare suppressed: the unfortunate history of Troilus and Cressida 112

8 All's Well That Ends Well: a 'feminist' play? 130

9 Shakespeare's mingled yarn and Measure for Measure 147

10 On not trusting Shakespeare's stage-directions 169

11 Shakespeare at work: preparing, writing, rewriting 188

12 Shakespeare on his deathbed: the last will and testament 222

Notes 234

fu~ w

v

Acknowledgements

The 'Bibliographical Note' acknowledges my debt to the editors and publishers of some of the chapters, or parts of chapters, reprinted in this volume. In addition it is a pleasure to thank all colleagues and students, in many universities, who listened patiently to the lectures that are now printed for the first time. I cannot complain that I lacked criticism; I hope that I benefited from it.

It is also a pleasure to thank Kathleen O'Rawe and Margaret Jones for help with typing, and the staff of Newcastle University Library for expert advice and assistance. Harold Jenkins read through the typescript and made many valuable suggestions. My wife, as usual, helped as proof-reader and as the critic's critic, and generously gave this book more of her time than it deserved.

vi

Note on texts and references

Quotations from Shakespeare, and line-references, are taken from Peter Alexander's William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Collins, 1951). A single line-reference after a quotation is to the first line quoted. Other Elizabethan plays are usually quoted from The Revels Plays (Manchester University Press). Old-spelling quotations from Elizabethan texts are modernised, except that I retain old spelling when there is a special reason for doing so: I hope that this will not cause confusion.

vii

Bibliographical note

Some of the essays in this volume are revised versions of earlier publications or lectures, or reprint parts of earlier publications, as indicated below. I am grateful to the editors and publishers for permission to reprint. I have not sought to disguise the fact that the lectures were written as lectures: my occasional exhortations to attentive listeners will not confuse the attentive reader.

1. 'In search of William Shakespeare: the public and the private man.' Partly based on a review in The New York Review of Books, vol. 31 (17 Jan 1985) pp. 23-6, and on 'Shakespeare and London's immigrant community circa 1600', in Elizabethan and Modern Studies Presented to Willem Schrickx, ed. J.P. Vander Motten (R.U.G., 1985). See also my Shakespeare's Impact on his Contemporaries (Macmil­lan, 1982) ch. 1.

3. 'The politics in Hamlet and the "world of the play".' From Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 5, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (Edward Arnold, 1963).

4. 'Trends in the discussion of Shakespeare's characters: Othello.' From Handelingen van het XXIX Vlaams Filologencongres (Antwerp, privately printed, 1973). Some of the ideas in this chapter were later developed in my Shakespeare: seven tragedies, the dramatist's manipulation of response (Macmillan, 1976).

5. 'The uniqueness of King Lear: genre and production problems.' A lecture delivered on 23 April1983 to the Deutsche Shakespeare­Gesellschaft West. Published in Jahrbuch, 1984.

6. 'Past, present and future in Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.' Partly based on a lecture delivered in Los Angeles, 1987, at a one­day conference on Macbeth sponsored by the University of California at Los Angeles.

7. 'Shakespeare suppressed: the unfortunate history of Troilus and Cressida.' Partly based on a lecture delivered to the Caltech­Weingart Conference at the Henry E. Huntington Library, 1982: see Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, ed. Jerome J. McGann (University of Chicago Press, 1985).

9. 'Shakespeare's mingled yarn and Measure for Measure.' A lecture delivered on 23 April 1981 at the British Academy. From Proceedings of the British Academy, LXVII (1983).

viii

Bibliographical note ix

10. 'On not trusting Shakespeare's stage-directions.' Partly re­printed from Shakespeare Survey 29 (1976), and partly based on a lecture delivered to the Renaissance Conference of Southern California, 1987.

11. 'Shakespeare at work: preparing, writing, rewriting.' Partly based on The Stability of Shakespeare's Text (1965), passim, and on 'Shakespeare as a reviser', in Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, ed. Jerome J. McGann (University of Chicago Press, 1985).

12. 'Shakespeare on his deathbed: the last will and testament.' A lecture delivered at the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Tokyo, 1991, printed in the New York Review of Books (7 Nov 1991, pp. 27-30) and reprinted with additions in the Congress Proceedings (Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions, ed. Tetsuo Kishi et al, Newark, 1994), pp. 127-37.

Preface to the Second Edition

For some years now Shakespeare criticism has looked away from the plays and concerned itself with other though related matters -with ideology, the state of society, the Renaissance and similar abstractions. I find the best of this criticism exciting and sympathise with many of its aims, even if I do not see myself as a member of any one of the new critical movements. Readers of this book will, however, discover that while I am uneasy about identifying social institutions in the plays with their Elizabethan counterparts (chapter 3), I try to do justice to Shakespeare's own unease when he deals with 'power' and ideology (chapter 2) or with gender politics or the like (chapter 8). My life-long determination to question received thinking is perhaps most obvious in the chapters on Shakespeare the man (1, 11, 12) and in that on stage directions (10); I believe, though, that the same basic attitudes inform the less transparently radical chapters that try to explain how individual plays work, particularly the chapters on King Lear, Macbeth and Measure for Measure (5, 6, 9).

While this is a collection of essays that all grapple with timeless problems rather than with time-bound movements (New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, etc.), I recognise that problems and movements are linked. The problems force me to look at the plays, not away from them, and to investigate what I consider the building-blocks of Shakespearian drama - character, plot, language, genre, response - that is, questions that were asked by Shakespeare's first audiences and that will continue to intrigue the world in centuries to come. And, as we know that his contem­poraries saw connections between the plays and Shakespeare the man, and that Herninge and Condell, the editors of the First Folio, already worried about the authenticity of his texts, I have boldly included chapters on these problems, which may displease those who say they believe in 'the death of the author' or that any text of Hamlet is as valid as any other 'as long as it works in the theatre'. In fact, I have added a twelfth chapter to this edition which brings together the author's personality and our interpret­ation of his text in a special way, and which also picks up threads from earlier chapters: the gentleness of 'gentle Shakespeare' (chapter 1); the integrity of a text and its revisions (chapters 7, 11);

X

Preface to the Second Edition xi

the interconnectedness of the critical questions we have to ask (introduction and chapter 7).

To repeat: the essays not only by-pass fashionable movements, they also - I hope - avoid the jargon and tunnel vision that these movements too often encourage. I want a general reader, if such a creature really exists, to be able to follow the argument, and I want him or her to understand the problems rather than to accept my solutions.

Inevitably, I have changed or partly changed my mind on some issues. It may interest readers to know how and why. After 14 years of hard labour on a new Arden edition of Othello (Arden 3, 1997) I felt obliged to renounce my earlier endorsement of Nevill Coghill's argument for the revision of this play, and have also thought again about the revision of King Lear.1 Nevertheless, the revision theory seems to me to have stood the test of time, in these two tragedies and as applied to Shakespeare more generally, even if some believers in Shakespearian revision appear to forget that other explanations of variant passages are also possible, and are sometimes much more likely.2

I have returned more than once to Shakespeare's social awareness and ideology, in reviews and scattered articles, and likewise in unpublished lectures on the Sonnets and on 'The Subversiveness of Henry V'. Even now, I would urge, after all the books and articles of the last dozen or so years, we still need to look more carefully at the Elizabethan social background and at its bearing on our interpretation of the plays.3

So far as I know, 'Trends in the discussion of Shakespeare's characters' has not received much attention. It may be worth pointing out that the 'attack on character' with which chapter 4 begins has continued, as has the defence of character.4 This is another debate that is likely to go on in the foreseeable future.

The original version of my new chapter 12, first published in 1991 and now reissued in expanded form, has already drawn an interesting comment from Richard Wilson. According to Wilson's Will Power Essays on Shakespearean Authority, Shakespeare's will was not as eccentric as I suggested (I prefer the word unusual), because

the will to paternal power of Shakespeare's generation was grounded in a legal right to acquire property and determine its transmission which had not existed before and would never be

xii Preface to the Second Edition

so absolute again until the Wills Act of 1837. It was an authority that the dramatist exploited to the full when he revised his own will ... (p. 209)

It is useful to be reminded that the structure of Shakespeare's will was influenced by historical developments. Nevertheless, Wilson concedes that 'it was Susanna, not, as custom dictated, her mother, who was made executrix of the will' (p. 210), and Shakespeare's other deviations from custom can now be more clearly understood with the help of a collection of wills, many of them previously unpublished, issued in the same year as Wilson's Will Power, namely Playhouse Wills 1558-1642 (eds. E. A. J. Honigmann and Susan Brock, Manchester, 1993).

NOTES

1. See pp. 21~, below; my The Texts of 'Othello' (1996), pp. 7-21; and my reviews in New York Review of Books, xxxi (1984), 16-18, and xxxvii (1990), 58-60.

2. Cf. my review of Grace Ioppolo, Revising Shakespeare in Modern Language Review, 88 (1993), 941-2.

3. Cf. my papers on 'Shakespeare and London's Immigrant Community circa 1600' (in Elizabethan and Modern Studies, ed. J.P. Vander Motten, Ghent, 1985) and on 'Social questioning in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays' (in Jacobean Drama as Social Criticism, Salzburg University Studies, ed. James Hogg, 1995).

4. Cf. John Drakakis, Alternative Shakespeares (1985), pp. 4 ff.; Peter Holland, 'The resources of characterization in Othello' (in Shakespeare Survey, 41 (1989), 119-32).