Taylor set out his evidence for the ascription in the TLS (December 20, 1985),
but the same issue contained a vigorous refutation by Robin Robbins, showing
that Taylor's argument was based on isolated verbal parallels between the
poem and Shakespeare, ignoring negative evidence. Robbins easily
demonstrated that other writers of the period had employed its stock
phrases. Undeterred, Taylor and Wells published the lyric in a section
euphemistically called "Various Poems", an attribution which prompted many
disbelieving readers to parody. When I surveyed the response to Taylor's
ascription in a book called "Counterfeiting" Shakespeare (2002) -one title
notably absent from Susan Brock's "Further Reading" -I found that none of
the many scholars who had commented on the poem supported Taylor's
attribution. To reprint it in the second edition of Shakespeare's Complete
Works is a strange rebuff to the notion of scholarly consensus. In a paper
given to the London Forum for Authorship Studies last year Taylor confessed
that he wasn't sure that Shakespeare wrote the poem, dismissed some of his
critics, and pointed out some resemblances with Barnaby Barnes's poetry. Yet
in public the Oxford editors continue to defend one of the most ridiculous
ascriptions to Shakespeare ever made.
The inclusion of this spurious poem (the 1997 Norton edition also found room
for John Ford's Funeral Elegy) was typical of a high-handed treatment of
Shakespeare's text. A feeling of superior historical correctness made them
change three of the play titles given in the 1623 First Folio edition by
Shakespeare's fellow actors John Heminge and Henry Condell. The Oxford
editors also knew better than Shakespeare, renaming his Falstaff in 1 Henry
IV as "Oldcastle" (but allowing the received name to stand in the other
three plays in which he appears), and correcting the Bard's Italian:
Brabantio and Gratiano in Othello became "Brabanzio" and "Graziano", a
change damaging the acoustic properties of Shakespeare's verse.
(Norton accepted the gratuitous Italian, but declined to rename Falstaff.)
Supposedly giving us Shakespeare's Complete Works, the Oxford-Norton editors
chose to include material by other hands, dating from the 1620s and the
1980s. It is well known that two songs for the witches in Macbeth also occur
in The Witch by Middleton, and that the Folio only quotes their opening
lines. The Oxford editors, however, inserted the complete songs and took the
liberty of describing the play as being "(Adapted by Thomas Middleton)".
They confidently declared that Measure for Measure was "Adapted by Thomas
Middleton" (no parentheses now), and Taylor has included both Shakespeare
plays in the forthcoming Oxford Middleton, an enormous boost to that
dramatist's oeuvre. The editors' evidence (only published in 1993) for
Middleton's hand in Measure for Measure mostly concerns Act One Scene Two,
where several stylistic features, and some dramaturgical loose ends, suggest
a revision by Middleton in about 1621. While accepting their attribution, I
find it perverse that the Oxford-Norton editors should have printed
Middleton's revised scene in their text, knowing that it was "made for
Shakespeare's company after his death", and consequently relegating
Shakespeare's briefer and wittier original to an appendix called "Additional
Passages". But this textual waste bin should really be called "Passages
Deducted by the Oxford Editors". Answering critics' objections to this
procedure, Taylor disingenuously responded that deleted passages "have not
been thrown away; they have simply been moved to a different place", a
remark which recalls Mary Douglas's anthropological definition of dirt as
"matter out of place".
For Pericles, the Oxford-Norton editors took an even greater liberty,
inserting into Shakespeare's text passages from George Wilkins's heavily
plagiarized novella, The Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre . .
. as it was lately presented . . . .
(1608). By versifying Wilkins's turgid prose, Taylor refashioned himself as a
co-author. Such an intervention, properly acknowledged, might be legitimate
for a theatre production, to conceal the deficiencies of this badly mangled
text. But for the Oxford editors to insert the product of Taylor's all-
unable pen into "Shakespeare's Complete Works", without any typographical
indication, shows a quite stunning disregard for the integrity of the canon.
(The Norton edition at least documents the inserted passages.) There will
probably never be a third edition, but if there were it would need major
changes.
The worst instances of the Oxford editors' high-handed treatment of
Shakespeare's text concerned plays which have come down to us in two
editions, an earlier Quarto (a single play, of about thirty pages) and the
collected Folio. In some cases, such as Troilus and Cressida, the
differences are slight, the Folio adding a Prologue not found in the 1609
Quarto.
(Unaccountably, the Oxford editors leave out Pandarus' closing speech,
although it is found in both substantive texts.) But others, such as Hamlet,
have major differences. Where Shakespearian Quartos include lines not found
in the Folio, or omit lines found there, editors have traditionally printed
a text containing "all of Shakespeare's Hamlet", so to speak. But the Oxford
editors, impressed by some arguments against "conflated texts", decided to
follow "the more theatrical" of the two versions -that is, the shorter.
Since the Quarto of Hamlet is about 3,800 lines and the Folio "some 230
lines shorter" (although it "includes about 70 additional lines"), they
argue that it represents Shakespeare's revision, for theatrical purposes.
Having chosen the shorter text, they then relegated sixteen snippets from
the authentic 1604 Quarto, totalling 247 lines and including Hamlet's
soliloquy "How all occasions do inform against me", to the "Additional
Passages" waste bin. But at 3,535 lines the Folio text is still far too long
for performance, and would have had to "lose" another 800 to 1,000 lines to
fit the performance slot agreed with the civic authorities, between 2 and 5
o'clock in the afternoon. In their 1990 retrospective, Wells and Taylor
admitted that they had made a "hopelessly confusing" presentation of the
"complex" text issue in Hamlet, and now wish they had presented two separate
texts. But they were concerned about the "bulk" of the edition, and it "was
one of the last plays we edited; we were tired".
Twenty years on, the Oxford editors' reasoning for preferring the "theatrical
text" seems obsolete. Behind it is their assumption that Shakespeare was a
theatre person, whose work only achieved its final form on the stage. Any
cuts in a play, they believe, must have had his approval, as an author who
was, uniquely, a sharer both in the King's Men and in the ownership of the
company's theatres. But anyone can see the flaw in this argument, that
Shakespeare the sharer may have assented to cuts that Shakespeare the author
regretted. As Alfred Hart showed in the 1930s, Shakespeare and Jonson were
the only two Elizabethan dramatists who regularly wrote plays longer than
the average length of 2,500 lines. Despite the Romantic belief that
Shakespeare only wrote for the moment, scorning the permanence of print, the
fact that forty-nine Quarto editions of his plays appeared during his
lifetime, more than those of any other dramatist, suggests that he was not
wholly indifferent to print. These and other gaps in the received picture
led Lukas Erne to publish a timely book, Shakespeare As Literary Dramatist
(2003), challenging the "either/or" division and arguing that Shakespeare
wrote both for the stage and for a reading public, with the longer versions
designed for readers. Erne's book has earned its favourable reception, and
many scholars now see the folly of basing major editorial decisions on the
theory that Shakespeare was essentially a theatre dramatist.
The Oxford editors' stubborn adherence to their theatrical paradigm caused
considerable damage to Shakespeare's text, nowhere more so than with King
Lear. In 1976, Michael Warren suggested that the 1623 Folio text of King
Lear was a revision of the 1608 Quarto made by Shakespeare himself, the
revisions being so great that the Folio version was essentially a different
play. In 1983, Warren joined Taylor in editing a book of nearly 500 pages
called The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare's two versions of "King
Lear". Believing this new orthodoxy to be definitive, in 1986 Taylor and
Wells included in the The Complete Works two separate texts, The History of
King Lear (Quarto) followed by The Tragedy of King Lear (Folio).
(The Norton edition covered its bets by adding a third, conflated text.) In
the second edition, which arranges the plays in chronological order (a good
idea, if difficult to carry out precisely), the Folio King Lear is made to
follow The Winter's Tale and precede Cymbeline, which would suggest that
Shakespeare went back to Lear in 1610, cut 300 lines, added another 100, and
so created a new play. This theory attracted much adverse criticism from the
outset, and a number of recent studies have demolished it.
If one consults a parallel-text edition, such as the helpful one by Rene Weis
(1993), for page after page the two versions are practically identical. As
Taylor himself conceded, the Folio-only passages include no new narrative
material, no major incidents, no new scenes, only "alterations here and
there". It adds bridging passages, clarifying local points, but any in-house
writer could have provided these. Only one speech in the Folio text seems to
have been rewritten, but in such a clumsy way that, as Peter Blayney
suggests, it looks as if two slips containing additions at different points
have been treated as one. Three quarters of the variations between Quarto
and Folio consist of cuts: one whole scene, a conversation between Kent and
a Gentleman, is omitted, and the astonishing scene where mad Lear,
sheltering in a hovel from the storm, "tries" the absent Goneril and Regan,
is shortened. The Folio also cuts numerous passages in the closing scenes.
However, Lear's role is unchanged, those of Edgar and Albany are slightly
shortened and there are both cuts and additions in the Fool's part. The
obvious explanation is that this is standard theatrical surgery, mostly made
to shorten playing time. For the exponents of a "bi-textual" Lear, however,
no change is fortuitous, every cut is purposeful, and was carried out by
Shakespeare.
