Marjorie Garber: Shakespeare After All
As I mention several times in these articles, my motivation in learning a little about Shakespeare was to try and understand what his plays must have been like for their original audiences. I started with the hypothesis that Shakespeare's plays were for their Elizabethan (and Jacobean) audience very similar to today's sitcoms. As I explored this hypothesis, looking in the process at a lot of what seems to be the best critical literature on Shakespeare, it seemed to me that there were indeed many strong similarities, but also many notable differences.
Certainly in Shakespeare's plays there are moments of profundity that surpass what one would find in even the best television sitcom. And, oddly enough, despite all the evidence that Shakespeare's concern was not to produce written literature, there seem to be many passages in the plays which it is difficult to believe could be understood by almost anyone during an actual performance, whether in our own time or Shakespeare's own.
A big part of my approach has been to focus not on the story line, but on the rhetoric and cadences and other ways in which Shakespeare gives signals to his audience. One example which I found especially compelling has to do with the cadences in Shakespeare's most well known passage, the "To Be or Not to Be" speech in Hamlet. It seemed unmistakably clear to me that the cadences of this speech (at least in the beginning) were those of oratory --- the American Southern preacher or the British Churchillian politician. So whether or not one refers to this speech as a soliloquy, it seems to be clearly more an address to the audience than a record of the character's internal thoughts.
But now Marjorie Garber points out something which I of course always knew, but hadn't really thought about. Namely, that we don't actually have good texts of Shakespeare's plays as originally performed.
Almost everyone with an interest in Shakespeare knows that there two categories of source texts: the quattros and the folios. The quattros were bootleg editions produced during Shakespeare's lifetime on the basis of playbooks and other dubious sources.
The folios, on the other hand, were quality editions, fairly carefully edited. It is natural to assume that the folio editions are the more reliable source. However it turns out that there is sometimes some very good material in the quattros which does not appear in the corresponding folio. Furthermore, to the best of our knowledge, Shakespeare himself had no part in preparing the folio editions for print; they were published by his friends after his death. So the edition which we see today tends to be a melange of the folio and various quattro editions, along with supposed corrections and improvements made by numerous editors over the four hundred years since Shakespeare's death.
The improvements made by various editors had many different objectives, depending on the age in which they were done. But one common change the editors made was to change the language of various passages to make it more "Shakespearean."
So now I realize, much to my embarrassment, that many of the rhetorical and rhythmic features in the plays which I found so significant, were apparently never in the play as Shakespeare's company performed it, but were changes made by subsequent editors.
In particular, my conclusion about Hamlet's "To Be or Not to Be" speech, whether correct or not, is based on the first folio edition, and may well be the editor's idea of what the speech ought to sound like, and not on the words Shakespeare himself wrote.
In the first quarto edition, the speech reads very differently:
To be or not to be --- I, there's the point.
To Die, to sleep, is that all? I, all:
No, to sleep, to dream, I mary, there it goes,
For in that dream of death, when we awake,
And borne before an everlasting Judge,
From whence no passenger ever returned,
The undiscovered country at whose sight
The happy smile, and the accursed damned.
But for this, the joyful hope of this,
Who'd bear the scorns and flattery of the world,
Scorned by the right rich, the rich cursed of the poor?
The widow being oppressed, the orphan wronged,
The taste of hunger, or a tyrant's reign,
And thousand more calamities besides,
To grunt and swear under this weary life,
When that he his full quietus make,
With a bare bodkin, who would this endure,
But for a hope of something after death?
Which puzzles the brain, and doth confound the sense,
Which makes us rather bear those evils we have,
Than to fly to others that we know not of.
I, that, oh this conscience does makes cowards of us all.
To my ear, at least, this seems like a bit of a botch. It could be what writers nowdays often call a "shitty first draft.". (Many contemporary writing teachers claim that the shitty first draft is an essential part off the writing process. I think though that there are many professional writers who disagree.) One can also see it as a rather inept attempt by someone from Shakespeare's audience to reconstruct the speech from memory.
To many of us, the First Folio version of the speech has much greater appeal.
First Folio Version:
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,
And, by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep ---
No more, and by a sleep to say we end
The heartaches and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to --- 'tis a consummation
Deeply to be wished. To die, to sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off that mortal coil
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life,
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of disprized love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th'unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than to fly to others we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied over with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currrents turn awry,
And lose the name of action...
Ah yes, this is the speech we all have reverence for (although no one ever completely understands it). The ringing oratorical tones in the beginning are thrilling, worthy of Churchill or Martin Luther King.
And yet, to me at least, there's something a little fishy about this First Folio version of the speech.
The heartache's and thousand natural shocksAnd
The flesh is heir to.
And thus the native hue of resolutionI certainly would not claim that Shakespeare never wrote like this. But these are the sorts of sentences that editorial writers and political speech writers strive for.
Is sicklied over with the pale cast of thought,
These's something a little too perfect here. Clearly version this is something that has been worked over again and again, each time replacing the obvious and natural word or phrase with one that is meant to dazzle. Replacing the dollar word with the fifty-dollar word.
Can we imagine this version being presented on Shakespeare's stage? On yes, we certainly can. But the action stops while the actor grandstands. Marjorie Garber writes,
Theatrically, these gorgeous philosophical digressions and rich metaphors slow down the action.She suggests that this version of the speech seems more like something to be read than performed.
If we have to choose between these two versions (and, to me, it seems likely that neither is an accurate redition of the speech as actually performed by Shakespeare's troupe), I would suggest paying attention to the line
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.Here most editors agree that conscience probably means "consciousness" or awareness. Even so, it is quite difficult to make sense of this line in a way that makes it fit into its place in the speech. Certainly a sufficiently ingenious critic can find an interpretation that works. But can we imagine a this line making sense to a spectator during the performance?
To me, the line does come close to making sense and being relevant in the First Quarto version of the speech. It seems to be saying, as I understand it, that our awareness of the uncertain nature of death is what makes us too cowardly to take the step of actually escaping from this miserable life by killing ourselves.
But in the more familiar, first Folio version of the speech, this line seems isolated and irrelevant.
Another instance, which I don't remember Garber writing about and which I can comment only speculatively, is the speeches of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. One of the remarkable features of this play is how Jewish Shylock sounds. But when we make this judgement, we are basing it on the speech of eastern European Jews of our own day. Did the Jews in England in Shakespeare's time (of which there were very few) actually sound like this?
I certainly don't know. As I say, I can only speculate. But it would certainly be interesting to look at a really good scholarly edition of the Merchant and see to what extent the play as we know it agrees with the original quarto and folio editions.