The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune: everyone knows the phrase. And
most people know where it’s from: “To be, or not to be: that is the
question: / Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and
arrows of outrageous fortune / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles . .
.”
What does it actually mean? Something about being buffeted by bad luck and
worldly troubles, obviously. But the image is curious. Fortune, who dishes
out our luck, is traditionally personified as a woman. If she has arrows,
shouldn’t she have a bow rather than a sling? Why didn’t Shakespeare write:
“The bow and arrow of outrageous fortune”? Or for that matter, “The slings
and stones of outrageous fortune”?
Shakespearian commentators have puzzled over this conundrum for centuries,
even going so far as to suggest that the inconsistency of weapon may mean
that “slings” is a printer’s error for “stings”. Now, however, we have a
solution. Almost every book written in the age of Shakespeare has been made
available in digitised form. So you can go to an amazing website from the
University of Toronto called Lexicons of Early Modern English and type in
the word “sling”. Within a second the search engine will have worked its way
through more than 150 dictionaries, glossaries and word lists from the 16th
and 17th centuries.
Up pops a citation from Randle Cotgrave’s A Dictionary of the French and
English Tongues (1611), the first English-French dictionary: “Mangonneau: An
old-fashioned sling, or engine, whereout stones, old iron, and great arrows
were violently darted.”
So arrows can be fired from a sling. Fortune doesn’t have a puny little hand
sling — rather she is firing off a huge catapult, a mighty engine of siege
warfare. Hamlet’s image in this line is as strong as that in the next, where
the hero imagines battling against an entire sea of troubles.
In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff is repeatedly tricked into being
caught in the house of Mistress Ford when her sexually possessive husband
comes home. The first time he is bundled out in a basket of dirty linen, the
second he escapes in the disguise of “the fat woman of Brentford”.
Brentford (spelt Brainford in Shakespeare’s time) was then still a village on
the road from London to Windsor. But why did Shakespeare choose to give the
place a name-check? Type it into an online database of every surviving play
from his time and you discover that Brentford was a favourite location for
sexual assignations. A modern equivalent would be a reference to “round the
back of King’s Cross”.
These are just two examples of how we are still making new discoveries about
Shakespeare’s amazingly inventive language. Traditionally editors have
glossed his more obscure words by taking a definition from the Oxford
English Dictionary. But in many cases the Oxford English Dictionary has come
up with its definition by simply looking at the example in Shakespeare. The
new online databases allow us to break out of this loop. They show us that
many words purportedly coined by Shakespeare were actually in wider currency
at the time, but they also make new revelations about the associative power
of his imagination.
“Do we really need another new edition of Shakespeare?” people ask me when I
tell them that, together with my team of associates, I’ve devoted nearly 20
years to the preparation of the new RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works. The new
possibilities for exploring his language are one reason why we most
certainly do.
Another is the astonishing fact that no edition in the past three centuries
has consistently adopted the text of the most authoritative original version
of Shakespeare’s plays: the 1623 First Folio (so named for the large size
and single fold of its paper) prepared by his fellow actors John Hemings and
Philip Condell. How on earth has this state of affairs come about?
The scholarly editing of Shakespeare began in the 18th century, when the model
for such activity was the treatment of the classic literary and historical
texts of ancient Greece and Rome. The procedure was to establish which
surviving manuscript was the oldest, the aim being to get as close as
possible to the lost original, weeding out the errors of transcription that
had been introduced by successive scribes in the centuries before the advent
of print. As Shakespeare began to be treated like a classic, the same
procedure was applied to his texts.
About half of Shakespeare’s plays appeared in print in his lifetime in quarto
format, cheap little books analogous to the modern paperback. Following the
classical principle that the earliest surviving text must be the one closest
to the original authorial manuscript, generations of editors preferred the
quarto texts to the posthumously produced folio — save in a small number of
cases where the quarto text was so full of errors and inconsistencies that
they had to rely on the folio.
For this reason, all edited texts of the complete works published in the past
three centuries have been hybrids of quarto and folio, scholarly
reconstructions that merge together different moments in the original life
of many of the plays.
If you look at printers’ handbooks from the age of Shakespeare, you quickly
discover that one of the first rules was that, whenever possible,
compositors were recommended to set their type from existing printed books
rather than manuscripts.
This was the age before mechanical typesetting, where each individual letter
had to be picked out by hand from the compositor’s case and placed on a
stick (upside down and back to front) before being laid on the press.
Printers’ lives were a lot easier when they were reprinting existing books
rather than struggling with handwritten copy.
Easily the quickest way to have created the First Folio would have been simply
to reprint those 18 plays that had already appeared in quarto and only work
from manuscript on the other 18. But that is not what happened. Whenever
quartos were used, playhouse “prompt books” were also consulted and stage
directions copied in from them. And in the case of several major plays where
a well-printed quarto was available (notably Hamlet, Othello, Richard III
and Troilus and Cressida), the folio printers were instructed to work from
an alternative, playhouse-derived manuscript.
This meant that the whole process of producing the first complete Shakespeare
took months, even years, longer than it might have done. Hemings and Condell
wanted “the great variety of readers” to work from texts that were close to
the theatre life for which Shakespeare originally intended them.
The Shakespeare First Folio is one of the iconic books in the cultural
tradition of the West — indeed, given Shakespeare’s unprecedented
international reach, of the world — but such is the conservatism of
scholarly tradition that it has taken three centuries for it to be properly
edited as a book in its own right and for the practice of mixing quarto and
folio copy texts to be challenged.
