What is a co-author?

Representations

Volumn 89, Issue , 2005, Pages 1-29

  Knapp, Jeffrey ^a  

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EID: 43249176527     PISSN: 07346018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rep.2005.89.1.1     Document Type: Article

References (119)

1. The early seventeenth century has been the standard point of origin, but Lukas Erne in his recent Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge, 2003) has powerfully argued that "the creation of the dramatic author" happened "a decade" earlier, in the 1590s (44, 34)
2. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London, 1986), 61
3. Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge, 1997) [hereafter TI], 14, 13; 4, 102, 113
4. Masten, "Playwrighting: Authorship and Collaboration," in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York, 1997), 370; TI, 10
5. TI, 13; G. E. Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeares Time, 1590-1642 (1971; reprint, Princeton, N.J., 1986) [hereafter PD], 199
6. cf. TI, 14, and Masten, "Playwrighting," 357. Bentley's estimate depends in part on the diary of the theatrical impresario Philip Henslowe: "nearly two-thirds" of the plays Henslowe mentions there "are the work of more than one man" (PD, 199). But Bentley lowers the ratio to half when he considers playwriting generally, rather than playwriting in Henslowe's company alone. Masten is content to extrapolate from the Henslowe figures. When Andrew Gurr concludes that "playwriting was chiefly a collective enterprise" in the commercial theaters, he too is treating Henslowe's diary "as the nearest indication there is of typical practice; The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford, 1996), 93 and 102
7. Nicholas Radel makes the same point in his review of Textual Intercourse in Shakespeare Quarterly 52 (2001): 524-27
8. TI, 21; Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (London, 1598), 280r; TI, 107. Masten repeatedly cites the 1598 Works of Chaucer (TI, 63-64, 74, 121, 177 n. 13) and offers a reproduction of its frontispiece (65)
9. TI, 21
10. TI, 13, 120, my emphasis. Masten sees playtexts as representative, not special, cases exemplifying the lateness of "the author's emergence" in "early modern English culture": they "consistently defy our modern sense of both authorship and anonymity" (TI, 12-13). The scare quotes that Masten places around the "birth" of the author are meant to indicate that this paradigm shift was a "contingent" rather than a natural or inevitable phenomenon (13)
11. An influential example is Leah Marcus's Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley, 1988). When Marcus asserts that Shakespeare "may... have been more interested as a dramatist in fending off the rising tide of authorship than in conforming to its emerging demands" (45), she simultaneously attributes authorship to Shakespeare (as a "dramatist") while pitting him against authorship. The contradiction is masked by an ambiguous usage of the term "authorship," which implicates the general sense of the author in the historically specific sense of the modern author. One might be tempted to discount such terminological slippage as a function of hyperbole or rhetorical flourish, as when Erne in Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist claims that "it is no exaggeration to say that in one sense, 'Shakespeare,' author of dramatic texts, was born in the space of two or three years at the end of the sixteenth century" (63). But Erne can so readily conflate the disparate senses of dramatic author, published author, and prestigious author in this sentence because he accepts the view that commercial plays were "collaboratively produced theatrical scripts" before they became authorial, even as he quarrels with Masten about the date when that change occurred (35). Like Masten and others, Erne equates a "lack of interest" (43) in dramatic authorship with the lack of a "concept" (40) for it. Yet, as his comparison of "sixteenth- century playwrights" to "modern screenwriters" suggests, a category of authorship can be widely understood even if it is also widely "ignored" (41)
12. Terence's plays were also featured - with attribution to Terence - in various compilations of translated excerpts such as the playwright Nicholas Udall's Floures for Latine Spekynge Selected and Gathered Oute of Terence, which appeared in 1534, 1538, 1544, 1560, 1568, 1572, and, with further excerpts, in 1575 and 1581
13. TI, 120. It is important to note that Gascoigne never claimed to be the sole author of Jocasta. In each of the 1573, 1575, and 1587 editions, the internal title page of Jocasta states that the play was written by "George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmershe of Grays Inn, and there by them presented." The notation "done by F. Kinwelmarshe" appears after acts 1 and 4; "done by G. Gascoigne" appears after acts 2, 3, and 5; while "done by Chr. Yelverton" appears after the epilogue. Committed as he is to a vaguely marxist idealization of collaborative labor, Masten does not mention that the first English plays published with acknowledgments of coauthorship were the products of gentlemanly amateurs, not commercial playwrights: besides Jocasta, these include The Tragedie of Gorbudoc; whereof three Actes were wrytten by Thomas Nortone, and the two laste by Thomas Sackvyle (London, 1565)
14. Certain dev[is]es and shewes presented to her Majestic by the gentlemen of Grayes-Inne at her Highnesse court in Greenewich [The Misfortunes of Arthur] (London, 1587)
15. and The Tragedies of Tancred and Gismund, Compiled By the Gentlemen of the Inner Temple, and by them presented before her MAJESTIE. Newly revived and polished according to the decorum of these dates. By R[obert]. W[ilmot]. (London, 1591). Not even these Inns of Court plays, however, count entirely as exceptions to the norm of attribution to single authors. As the published text of Jocasta and the title page of Gorbudoc indicate, such plays were typically presented as compilations of work by single authors. In the commercial theaters, collaborative writing seems to have been envisioned as a similar combination of single authorships: "separate composition of individual acts is a division of labor which was quite common from 1590 to 1642" (PD, 228-34)
16. For quantitative assessments of how frequently the title pages of Renaissance printed plays cite authors, see James P. Saeger and Christopher J. Fassler, "The London Professional Theater, 1576-1642: A Catalogue and Analysis of the Extant Printed Plays," Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 34 (1995): 63-109
17. and Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, "'Vile Arts': The Marketing of English Printed Drama, 1512-1660," Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 39 (2000): 77-165. Neither of these studies discusses the mention of authors within plays
18. I am counting only those plays that were printed before 1600. In order of first publication date, they are Fulgens and Lucres (c. 1512), The Nature of the .iii. Element[s] (1520), Of Gentylnes and Nobylyte (1525), Acolastus (1540), King Darius (1565), Pacient and Meeke Grissill (1566?), Triall of Treasure (1567), Like Will to Like (1568), Cambises (1569), Damon and Pithias (1571 and 1582), New Custom (1573), Apius and Virginia (1575), The Tyde Taryeth No Man (1576), Common Conditions (c. 1577), All for Money (1578), Susanna (1578), The Conflict of Conscience (1581), Fedele and Fortunio (1585), II Tamburlaine (1590), Midas (1592), The Pedlers Prophecie (1595), Woman in the Moone (1597), Octavia (1598), and Clyomon and Clamydes (1599). The author is also invoked in at least four pre-1600 manuscripts that were never printed during the Renaissance: Respublica (performed 1553), Misogonus (performed 1570), The Thracian Wonder (in the chorus at the end of act 1; 1599), and Club Law (1599). "The writer" and "Poet" are mentioned in the printer's letter to the reader in Menaecmi (London, 1595), A3r. And Hieronimo twice refers to himself as the "author" of his revenge play in act 4 of The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1592)
19. ed. Philip Edwards (Manchester, 1959), 4.3.3 and 4.4.147. Finally the Latin play Christus Triumphans, published in Basel in 1556, places "Autore Ioanne Foxo Anglo" immediately before the prologue, which twice mentions the "poeta"
20. John Foxe, Two Latin Comedies, ed. and trans. John Hazel Smith (Ithaca, NY, 1973), 228-31. Erne also notes that "from very early on, certain kinds of dramatic publications acknowledged the writers' identity," but these, he claims, were amateur products of the university, the closet, the Inns of Court, not "plays of the commercial stage" (Shakespeare, 45). Many of the citations I list belong to interludes that may have been acted by professionals; their provenance alone cannot in any case exclude them as evidence of an implicit cultural understanding that commercial plays were authored
21. "Baleus Prolocutor" had earlier appeared in the Wesel editions of the Chief Promises (1547)
22. of The Temptacyon of our Lorde (1547)
23. and of Three Laws (1548)
24. Willam Shakespeare, Henry V (acted c. 1599)
25. Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623), facsimile reproduction ed. Charlton Hinman (New York, 1968), 449; see TI, 75. References to the authors of plays also regularly figure in Renaissance antitheatrical literature, which can hardly be said to have participated in the elitist glorification of play wrights
26. See, e.g., Stephen Gosson's Playes Confuted in Five Actions (London, 1582), which reprehends "the drift of him that wrote the play termed the three Ladies of London" (D1v), "the writer of the play called London against the three Ladies" (D2r), and especially "the Author of the Play of plays shown at the Theater, the three and twentieth of February last" (D5v), who seems to have intended his play as a reply to Gosson's earlier diatribes (cf. E6v, F1y F8r, and G1r). Gosson also mentions classical dramatists (e.g., at D3v) and even acknowledges that he himself has authored plays (B1r)
27. TI, 75; The Second Part of Henrie the Fourth (London, 1600), L1v
28. Citing no evidence, Masten asserts that "in the theater" the "writers" of "most" plays "were not known" (TI, 13)
29. Meres may be listing thirteen plays, if "Henry the 4" means both parts. The three plays that had been published with attribution were Richard II (1597), Richard III (1597), and Loves' Labors Lost (1598)
30. Henry Crosse, Verities Common-wealth (London, 1603), Q3v
31. The Returne From Pernassus (London, 1606), B2v
32. cf. The Three Parnassus Plays (1598-1601), ed. J B. Leishman (London, 1949), 244
33. The Parnassus plays were performed c. 1598-1601; the Returne was the only one of the three to be published during the Renaissance
34. For the argument that Henry Chettle and not Robert Greene authored the Groats-worth, see Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author (Oxford, 2002), 140 n. 7. Such debates are irrelevant to my point here, which is that the title Greenes Groats-worth demonstrates a contemporary interest in authorship
35. Robert Greene, Greenes Groats-worth of Witte (London, 1592), F1v. The passage from Crosse I quoted earlier is in fact a paraphrase of a passage in the Groats-worth
36. To my knowledge, no reviewer of Textual Intercourse questions Masten's contention that a paradigm of collaboration preceded a paradigm of single authorship in the Renaissance, although Radel does wonder whether dramatic co-authorship was as dominant apractice at the time as Masten claims. In his essay on "Collaboration" for A Companion to Renaissance Drama, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Oxford, 2002), 540-52, Philip McGuire too accepts Masten's argument that "collaboratively written plays precede, elude, and resist 'categories of singular authorship' " and that collaboration was the dominant mode of authorship during the period (541-42). But see Vickers's lengthy critique of Masten, which anticipates my own in many respects (Shakespeare, 528-41)
37. For a thorough documentation of the recent emphasis on collaboration in Renaissance studies, see Heather Hirschfeld, "Early Modern Collaboration and Theories of Authorship," PMLA 116 (2001): 609-22
38. For a survey of recent work on collaboration in Anglo-American literary criticism generally, see Holly A. Laird, "'A Hand Spills from the Book's Threshold': Coauthorship's Readers," PMLA 116 (2001): 344-53
39. Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?" (1969), a revised version of which is translated by Josue V. Harari in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josue V. Harari (Ithaca, NY, 1979), 148-49
40. In Renaissance literary criticism, the best examples of this legal historiography are Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, Mass., 1993)
41. Joseph Loewenstein, The Author's Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright (Chicago, 2002)
42. and Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge, 2002)
43. Rose's Authors and Owners opens with a Foucauldian slippage from a general claim about authorship to a more specific claim about modern authorship. After first invoking the title of Foucault's essay and then asserting that "the notion of the author is a relatively recent formation," Rose singles out "proprietorship" as "the distinguishing characteristic of the modern author" (1; my emphasis). As Brian Vickers has underscored, Masten sketches a vague timeline for authorship. Although Masten identifies "the site of Foucault's critique" in "What Is an Author?" as a "post-Enlightenment perspective of individual authorship" and goes on to link the very notion of an "individuated style" to various Foucauldian "technologies" of authorship such as "intellectual property, copyright, individuated handwriting," he defines these technologies as "specific to a post-Renaissance capitalist culture," and even then he locates an "emerging regime of the author" within the Renaissance (TI, 16 and 17 [cf. "Playwrighting, " 373]
44. Vickers, Shakespeare, 528). This slippage from the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries to the seventeenth century is most conspicuous when Masten derives the authorial ideology that superseded collaboration not from capitalism, as his Foucauldian genealogy would seem to require, but rather from monarchism: he labels the belief in single authors "the absolutist patriarchal model of authorship" (TI, 60)
45. PD, 234 and 198
46. Stephen Orgel, "What Is a Text?" (1981), in The Authentic Shakespeare, and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage (New York, 2002), 1-5
47. Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, 587. Masten points out that there are often no apostrophes in such possessives (TI, 21-22), but "Authors" are distinguished from "Actors" whether the adjectives are singular or plural
48. The prologue to The Nature of the .iiii. Element[s] (London, 1520) introduces "the players" after much discussion of "the author" and his "own" intentions: for example, every man after his fantasy Will write his conceit be it never so rude Be it virtuous vicious wisdom or folly Wherefore to my purpose thus I conclude Why should not then the author of this interlude Utter his own fantasy and conceit also. (A2v)
49. [Nicholas Udall?], Respublica (performed 1553), ed. W. W. Greg (London, 1952), 2
50. [W. Wager?], A New and Mery Enterlude, Called the Triall of Treasure (London, 1567), A2v. Gosson's antitheatrical Playes Confuted (1582) also repeatedly distinguishes "a Poet's ink-horn" from "a Player's tongue" (D1v; cf. D3v-D4r and F1v)
51. Orgel, "What Is a Text?" 1, 5, 1. Extending Orgel's line of argument, Leah Marcus has argued that the First Folio gives an air of "authenticity" to playtexts that may have been intended from the start as "provisional, amenable to alterations by the playwright or others" (Puzzling Shakespeare, 43-44)
52. Similarly Margreta De Grazia has maintained that the First Folio attempts to "constitute," not "document," the unity of Shakespeare's canon; Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford, 1991), 41. Neither position is logically incompatible with the notion that Shakespeare authored, or helped to author, the plays collected in the Folio
53. Orgel, "What Is a Text? 4; TI, 20. In recent criticism, this oscillation between general and specific senses of collaboration parallels the oscillation between general and specific senses of authorship. Elaborating his ambiguous reference to "the sustaining collaborations of [Shakespeare's]
54. art," David Kastan in his introduction to A Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford, 1999) links the claim that "drama is self-evidently a collaborative activity" to the even more universal notion that "all intellectual and artistic activity... is necessarily social" (5). Masten acknowledges that "including theatrical production in a discussion of 'collaboration' may risk an excessive broadening of the term" (15), but he invariably downplays the risk
55. Thus he describes The Knight of the Burning Pestle as "perhaps the most wildly collaborative play of this period," adding, "I do not here mean 'collaborative' merely in the usual, restricted sense of two or more writers writing together" (23). Similarly Masten begs the question of authorship when he defines "textual production" in the broadest possible terms, as "the writing, performance, collection, publication, and circulation of plays, and the ways in which those processes were understood to function" (4)
56. The Travailes of the Three English Brothers (London, 1607), H4v, A2r
57. Gerald Eades Bentley in his Jacobean and Caroline Stage (Oxford, 1941-68) notes that "the second issue of the 1607 quarto... has an added epistle to the family of the Shirleys which is signed John Day. William Rowley. George Wilkins'" (5:1015). There are two ambiguous possessives in manuscripts dating from around 1599: "our Authors intent" in the epilogue to Club Law, and "our Authors pen" in the chorus ending the first act of The Thracian Wonder. The Little. French Lawyer, performed c. 1620 but not printed till the 1647 folio of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, refers in prologue to "the writers and our selves," in epilogue to "us and our Poets." While the prologue to Arviragus and Philicia (1639) speaks in general of "our Poets," the epilogue cites only one "Author."
58. Vickers, Shakespeare, 10-18. Vickers notes that his figures document "only the first publication of acknowledged co-authored plays, not their reprintings (often considerable). Nor have I attempted to list the many collaborations of which we have evidence in Henslowe's Diary the Stationers' Register, the licensing records of Sir Henry Herbert, and other contemporary sources" (15). With the different cut-off dates of 1584 and 1623, Erne finds "multiple authorship" acknowledged in "13 of the 111 plays attributed," or "less than 12 percent" (Shakespeare, 44)
59. TI, 131; Vickers, Shakespeare, 18; PD, 232 n. 29
60. Bentley, Jacobean, 4:753
61. Martha Woodmansee appears to express this nostalgia in the very title of her essay "On the Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity," in The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Durham, N.C., 1994), 15-28. For Masten, the Utopian sentiment is sexual as well as economic: he describes co-authorship as "a mode of homoerotic textual production existing prior to and eventually alongside the more familiar mode of singular authorship" (TI, 60). As Radel points out in his review of Textual Intercourse, however, Masten does not provide "adequate evidence to demonstrate anything like a consistent discursive paradigm linking homoerotic desire and authorial collaboration" (526)
62. Cf. Paulina Kewes's review in The Library 21 (June 1999): 162 and 164
63. Masten states that Bartholomew Fair "explicitly stages the intrusion of an author into the theater" in "perhaps the earliest explicit appearance of the playwright-author on the English stage" (TI, 108). But Jonson never does appear on the stage in Bartholomew Fair
64. Masten may be misremembering Joseph Loewenstein's influential essay "The Script in the Marketplace"; Representations 12 (Fall 1985): 101-14, which follows a reading of the induction to Bartholomew Fair with the compelling argument that 'Jonson intruded himself on the mechanisms of print publication" (108, my emphasis)
65. PD, 198-99, 220-24, and 209-10. McGuire also stresses that the King's Men became relatively more interested in collaborative plays later in their history ("Collaboration," 543-45), but he fails to acknowledge the trouble this causes for a timeline in which authorship takes the place of collaboration
66. Commenting on Masten's claim that any "contestation of author/ity between actors and authors" was merely "nascent" at the start of the seventeenth century, when "an author-centered, agonistic paradigm" began to emerge (TI, 112), Mario DiGangi remarks that "the agonistic dynamics so often associated with Jonson's career... may have been more typical of his time than Masten suggests. Not only cooperation and alliance but antagonism and rivalry structured the nonetheless collaborative institution of theater in early seventeenth-century England"; Review of Textual Intercourse in Journal of English and Germanic Philology 98 (1999): 92
67. Cf. Gregory Chaplin, "'Divided Amongst Themselves': Collaboration and Anxiety in Jonson's Volpone," ELH 69 (2002): 61
68. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1992) [hereafter FN], 203, 202, 216, 218, 199, 200, 199, 204
69. FN, 213; Thomas Nashe, "To the Gentlemen Students of Both Universities" (1589), in Works, 5 vols., ed. R. B. McKerrow (1903-10), reprint ed. F. P. Wilson (Oxford, 1958), 3:311 and 324
70. Nashe, Piers Penilesse (1592), in Works, 1:215; FN, 234. Nashe also seems to have cowritten a play with Greene
71. see E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1923) [hereafter ES], 3:451
72. Farmer and Lesser, "'Vile Arts,'" 80, paraphrasing Saeger and Fassler. As Farmer and Lesser note, Saeger and Fassler maintain that "the gradual rise of author-without-company and decline of company-without-author attributions" on the title pages of printed plays indicate the growing elevation of authorship over collaborative theatricality. Farmer and Lesser show; however, that the overall "frequency of company attributions on title pages remained steady" throughout the Renaissance, while the number of theater attributions on title pages rose: their data seriously undermines the thesis that "the rise of the author served to distance plays from their theatrical origins" (80, 85, 81). For the most impressive demonstration that playwriting was accorded literary prestige significantly earlier than recent criticism allows, see Erne, Shakespeare, esp. 1-55. But the findings of Farmer and Lesser cast doubt on Erne's more conventional claim that attributions of authorship helped legitimate plays "by dissociating them from the disreputable commercial playhouses where players, shareholders, theatrical entrepreneurs, and playwrights collaborated" (Shakespeare, 43)
73. As the most celebrated players of their day, Tarlton and Wilson had in any case received the kind of singular attention that Helgerson associates with authors; they had even been singled out as authors in print, by Thomas Lodge (c. 1579) and Gabriel Harvey (1592). In Four Letters (London, 1592), Harvey maintains that Nashe's Piers Penilesse is in "the style, and tenor of Tarleton's precedent, his famous play of the seven Deadly sins" (quoted in ES, 3:497)
74. The title page of The Coblers Prophesie (London, 1594) attributes the play to "Robert Wilson. Gent."
75. FN, 216, 227, 226
76. Leishman, Parnassus Plays, 337; FN, 223
77. Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, 6. David Kastan treats the dedication itself as anticollaborative: he claims that it fails to "emphasize the fruitful collaborations of playwright and actor, the popularity of the plays among audiences of all ages and social classes, or even suggest, as some play texts did, that the true life of drama is on the stage"
78. Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge, 2001), 71. "In their epistle," Kastan concludes, "Heminge and Condell establish Shakespeare as an author by erasing the very conditions of his art, the active principles of its realization" (77). To arrive at this view however, Kastan must overlook not only the claim of professional fellowship in the epistle but also the mass of introductory material that Heminge and Condell compile around the epistle. First there is their subsequent dedication "To the great Variety of Readers," which emphasizes that "these Plays have had their trial already" on the "Stage." Then there is the commendatory poem by Jonson and its famous lines on Shakespeare as "The applause! delight! the wonder of our Stage!" Then Hugh Holland's commendatory poem writes of "hands" that "clapt" and "plays" that "made the Globe of heav'n and earth to ring." Then there is Leonard Digges's assertion that he will regard the "Stage" as "bankrout" "till I hear a Scene more nobly take, / Than when thy half-Sword parlying Romans spake." Then I. M. elaborates a conceit on Shakespeare's "Stage," "Tiring-room," "Spectators," "applause," "Exit," and "Reentrance." And finally, before they offer any playtext, Heminge and Condell supply "The Names of the Principal Actors in all these Plays"
79. TI, 127; Masten cites the work of de Grazia. Although Masten does briefly mention the actors' dedication in the Beaumont and Fletcher folio, he immediately links it to a "consolidation of authority" (128). He also describes the dedication as part of a "tradition," but this is misleading, as a brief survey of collected writings by other commercial playwrights shows. There is no dedicatory letter from any "fellow" in The Workes of Mr. John Marston, Being Tragedies and Comedies, Collected into One Volume (London, 1633)
80. the letter is instead signed by the printer, William Sheares. In The Whole Workes of Samuel Daniel (London, 1623), the dedicatory letter is signed by Daniel's brother John
81. There is no general dedicatory letter at all to Thomas Nabbes's Playes, Maskes, Epigrams, Elegies, and Epithalamiums (London, 1639), and the same is true for Jonson's 1616 Workes: that volume begins with commendatory poems from writers such as John Selden, George Chapman, and Beaumont, not from any actors. Likewise, the Poems of Thomas Randolph (London, 1638) has no dedicatory letters, but it does have commendatory poems from various university men. If the single previous instance of an actors' dedication in Shakespeare's First Folio can be called a tradition, it is a King's Men tradition
82. FN, 223; Hamlet 3.2.38-45; FN, 224. Masten too associates the shift from collaboration to authorship with a repudiation of improvisation: in his reading of Bartholomew Fair, "the Booke-holder of Jonson's induction wrests control of the theater from the Stagekeeper, spokesman for the improvisatory and collaborative mode of theatrical production of an ostensibly prior era" (TI, 109)
83. Hamlet is attributed to Shakespeare not only in the First Folio and on the title pages of three quarto editions published during his lifetime but also in various contemporary references to the play, some of which I will shortly consider. In my view, there is currently no compelling evidence that significant portions of the 1604 Second Quarto and Folio texts were written by someone other than Shakespeare or that these two texts represent significantly different conceptions of the play. Therefore, I cite the collated version of Hamlet in The Riverside Shakespeare (New York, 1974). I agree with the majority of scholars who regard the 1603 First Quarto as a memorial reconstruction of the play. (Although Erne is somewhat vague about this, he challenges a particular account of Q1 as memorial reconstruction, not the broader claim of memorial reconstruction per se
84. see Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, chap. 8.)
85. For the most vigorous defense of Q1 as a coherent play in its own right, see Leah Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (New York, 1996), 132-76. Marcus associates scholarly dismissals of Q1 with a preference for the literate, authorial, and elite over the oral, collaborative, and popular. I am arguing that the Q2 and F Hamlets undercut these oppositions
86. Hamlet 3.2.277-78, 2.2.329-62. For the so-called War of the Theaters to which Shakespeare refers, see James P. Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets' War (New York, 2001)
87. I am not claiming that Shakespeare was radically innovative in his dramatization of a player-author. There had been actor-dramatists before Shakespeare, such as John Bale and Anthony Munday. There had also been actor-dramatist characters before Hamlet: the best known of them is Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy (published c. 1592), who proclaims himself "author and actor" in both the play-within-the-play and the "tragedy" of his life (4.4.147). But the convergence of Shakespeare's complex professional identity with the revenge-play conventions inherited from The Spanish Tragedy does seem to have facilitated a more pointed and extensive treatment of the player-author in Hamlet than in earlier English plays
88. Hamlet 2.2.466-67 and 541-42, 3.2.1; FN, 224; Stephen Greenblatt anticipates this point in his "General Introduction" to The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Greenblatt et al. (New York, 1997), 67
89. Hamlet 5.2.31, 51; FN, 224; Hamlet 3.2.125
90. Leah Marcus, among others, anticipates this point about Hamlet's clowning during the play: see Puzzling Shakespeare, 47
91. Hamlet 1.5.97-104; 2.2.142; 1.2.36-38, 131-32; 1.5.13-14, 105-10, 116, 172
92. Hamlet 5.1.184-91, 2.2.561-62, 1.2.129; I have substituted the better-known Folio reading of "solid" for the quartos' "sullied," although Elizabethan pronunciation made the choice between them almost moot
93. FN, 223; Anthony Scoloker, Daiphantus (London, 1604), A2r
94. Helgerson's argument is influenced by Andrew Gurr's Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (Cambridge, 1987), which also draws too clean a distinction between comedy and tragedy when it speaks of a "shift in audience priorities from knockabout to tragic poetry" during the last decades of the sixteenth century (128)
95. Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie (written c. 1580-82, published 1595)
96. in Defence of Poesie, Astrophil and Stella, and Other Writings, ed. Elizabeth Porges Watson (London, 1997), 121-24. Helgerson himself places Sidney on the side of an authors' theater (201) and the mingling of kings and clowns on the side of "a popular theater" (227). Acknowledging the existence of a few classical tragi-comedies, Sidney insists that "if we mark them well, we shall find, that they never or very daintily match Horn-pipes and Funerals" (123). Shakespeare seems to allude to this passage when he has Claudius euphuistically defend "mirth in funeral" and "dirge in marriage" (Hamlet 1.2.12), a theme upon which Hamlet famously obsesses
97. Scoloker, Daiphantus, A2r; Hamlet 2.2.435-39; 3.2.25-28. Hamlet here seems to echo that berattler of the common stages Jonson, who in his Apology to Poetaster (acted 1601) promises to abandon comedy for tragedy: "where, if I prove the pleasure but of one, / So he judicious be, he shall be alone / A theater unto me"; Poetaster, ed. Tom Cain (Manchester, 1995), lines 213-15; Cain notes the allusion
98. Hamlet 1.2.160-63, 2.2.222-24, 2.2.537 and 546; 4.3.4-5 and 4.7.18
99. Gabriel Harvey, Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Stratford-upon-Avon, 1913), 232-33. Interestingly Harvey wrote his note in the margins of Chaucer's 1598 Workes
100. Ulpian Fulwell, Like Will to Like (London, 1568), A2r. The title page states that the play was "made by Ulpian Fulwell," and the name "Ulpian Fulwell" (F1v) appears at the end of the play as well
101. For Gascoigne's letter, see G. W. Pigman III's edition of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (Oxford, 2000), 369. Gascoigne thinks that the heterogeneity of a play is in any case inevitable: "I am of opinion, that in every thing which is written (the holy scriptures excepted) there are to be found wisdom, folly, emulation, and detraction. For as I never yet saw any thing so clerkly handled, but that therein might be found some imperfections: So could I never yet read fable so ridiculous but that therein some morality might be gathered" (370)
102. See my Shakespeare's Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago, 2002)
103. Hamlet 2.2.500-501, 3.2.10-12, 2.2.396-99, 5.2.107 and 113
104. Hamlet 3.2.149, 1.5.143-64
105. William Empson, "Hamlet" (1953), revised in Essays on Shakespeare, ed. David B. Pirie (Cambridge, 1986), 85. Gurr cites a further instance of a strangely improvisational moment in Hamlet that spotlights the actors as actors. When Hamlet and Polonius discuss how Polonius once played the part of Julius Caesar "I' the university" and was "kill'd" by Brutus (3.2.98-106), they seem to be alluding to Shakespeare's own Julius Caesar, in which the original actor of Hamlet's part, Richard Burbage, must have played Brutus, and the original actor of Polonius's part must have played Caesar. Gurr treats this illusion-breaking as a final remnant of a bygone clownish theatrics: while "Richard Burbage as Hamlet could still step outside his role" in the manner of Tarlton "to joke" with the audience, contemporary praise for Burbage's ability to "convince his audiences of the reality of the roles he played" shows "how fully the power of dramatic illusion in the self-contained play took over from Tarltonizing" (Playgoing, 127-28). Once again Gurr too sharply distinguishes improvisational comedy from scripted tragedy. The illusion-breaking in this scene is characteristic of the play; and its effect is as tragic as comic: by alluding to these past roles of "Hamlet" and "Polonius," Shakespeare eerily forecasts that Hamlet will kill Polonius
106. Nicholas Rowe (1709) claimed to have been told that the "top" of Shakespeare's "Performance was the Ghost in his own Hamlet"
107. quoted in S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (New York, 1977), 201
108. FN, 224.1 am currently working on a book entitled Shakespeare Only in which I hope to address the problem of Shakespeare's ambition more fully
109. Hamlet 2.2.401; my emphasis
110. Hamlet 5.2.30-31 and 10-11; for the sake of clarity I have substituted "ere" for its older form in the text, "or."
111. TI, 15; Masten, "Playwrighting," 357
112. Vickers, Shakespeare, 6; PD, 279. For a compelling case that Shakespeare imagined himself as an author "for the stage and the page,"
113. see again Erne's remarkable Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, 20
114. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, eds., Ben Jonson (Oxford, 1925-52), 9:13
115. Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 4:609
116. James A. Riddell, "Ben Jonson's Folio of 1616," in The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson, ed. Richard Harp and Stanley Stewart (Cambridge, 2000), 152
117. David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 226
118. De Grazia, Shakespeare, 32
119. G. E. Bentley, The Profession of Player in Shakespeare's Time, 1590-1642 (Princeton, N.J., 1984), 10