The Shakespearean International Yearbook

Volume 11: Special Issue, Placing Michael Neill. Issues of Place in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture

Jonathan Gil Harris, Jonathan Gil Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351963466
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This eighth volume of The Shakespearean International Yearbook presents a special section on 'European Shakespeares', proceeding from the claim that Shakespeare's literary craft was not just native English or British, but was filtered and fashioned through a Renaissance awareness that needs to be recognized as European, and that has had effects and afterlives across the Continent. Guest editors Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo have constructed this section to highlight both how the spread of 'Shakespeare' throughout Europe has brought together the energies of a wide variety of European cultures across several centuries, and how the inclusion of Shakespeare in European culture has been not only a European but also a world affair. The Shakespearean International Yearbook continues to provide an annual survey of important issues and developments in contemporary Shakespeare studies. Contributors to this issue come from the US and the UK, Spain, Switzerland and South Africa, Canada, The Netherlands, India, Portugal, Greece, France, and Hungary. In addition to the section on European Shakespeares, this volume includes essays on the genre of romance, issues of character, and other topics.

1 Gentle Shakespeare and the Authorship of Arden of Faversham

Macdonald P. Jackson

I: PROLOGUE

For many years Michael Neill and I, as University of Auckland colleagues, shared the bulk of the teaching of undergraduate English courses on Shakespeare and other early modem playwrights. We each had favorite plays to lecture on. Whenever Michael succeeded in wresting from me one to which I had assumed customary rights of possession, he would a few years later publish a brilliant critical essay on it. Arden of Faversham is a case in point, as will be evident from my comments in Section II.

Besides lecturing in the same courses, we collaborated on one substantial research project, the editing of The Selected Plays of John Marston for the Cambridge Renaissance and Restoration Dramatists series in 1985. I was responsible for preparing the texts, but it was Michael who proposed the volume's most ingenious emendation. Marston's characters are apt to lapse into incoherence under the presence of strong emotion or even, in some cases, of weak thought. This makes him a difficult playwright to edit. It can be hard to decide whether apparent nonsense is the result of textual corruption or is a realistic mimicking of the vagaries of human dialogue. Marston's is a highly original dramatic language, incorporating the ellipses, interruptions, side-trackings, stutterings, and syntactical ambiguities of real speech.

In Antonio and Mellida, Antonio has been separated from his love Mellida, and is exhausted and distracted from running around in search of her. In the Quarto (1602) his long soliloquy ends:

O, this is naught, but speckling melancholic.
I haue beene
That Morpheus tender skinp Cosen germane
Beare with me good
Mellida: clod vpon clod thus fall.
Hell is beneath; yet heauen is ouer all.

The passage had been cited by several commentators as illustrating Marston's fondness for the rhetorical device of aposiopesis (or the sudden breaking off of speech), as a means of rendering the breakdown of language under pressure of extreme emotion. However, Antonio does, after all, manage a formal closing couplet, and the immediately preceding incoherence began to disappear when Michael recognized that what looks like Morpheus, god of dreams and sleep, is really a Marstonian spelling of a verb from the word "morphew," a blotch or scurfy eruption of the skin: it is "speckling melancholy / That morphews tender skins," as Timothy Bright's Treatise of Melancholy (1586) and Philemon Holland's Natural History (1601) make clear.¹ The Quarto's "I haue beene" has been misplaced.

The Marston volume was Michael's first venture into editing. He has since prepared editions of Anthony and Cleopatra, Othello, Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling, and Massinger's The Renegado. These all benefit, in their introductions and commentaries, from Michael's outstanding interpretative and critical skills and his sense of the theater, but they also display his abilities as a textual editor. Othello poses special problems, because it exists in two texts, a late Quarto of 1622 and the First Folio of 1623. The relationship between these two printings remains mysterious. In his account of the text, Michael negotiates his way adeptly through a mass of contradictory data and theories. His own provisional conclusions allow him to base his edition on the Folio as more adequately reflecting Shakespeare's own "maximal" version, while adopting Quarto readings that seem clearly superior because the Folio variant is a corruption by a compositor or scribe. Textually, what is most essential in an edition of this kind is that the editor has the sensitivity to literary and dramatic values to make the right choices between the Quarto, the Folio, and some later emendation. Michael seems to me exceptionally good at making these decisions and supporting them in his elegantly written notes. In an influential series of critical articles he had established Othello as perhaps supplanting even Hamlet and King Lear as the Shakespearean tragedy for our time. I think his edition of Othello will be seen as the standout achievement of the Oxford series.

However, a detailed assessment of "Neill as Editor" is beyond the scope of these brief introductory remarks. In what follows I turn to Arden of Faversham, one of "my" plays that Michael eventually got his chance to lecture on, and then to publish an article on. But he did leave me with something still to say about it. Here, a consideration of aspects of Arden of Faversham that are foregrounded in Michael's fine critical article leads into an outline of new evidence of Shakespeare's part-authorship of the play.

II

"This Figure, that thou here seest put, / It was for gentle Shakespeare cut," announced Ben Jonson in his epigram on the page facing the famous Droeshout engraving in the First Folio of 1623.² Shakespeare would doubtless have been pleased with the adjective, testimony not only to his demeanor but also to his social standing. Amiable, courteous, and kind (according to Jonson), he was also a gentleman. He had worked hard to earn the title for his father, John, and himself, having been granted a coat-of-arms from the College of Heralds in 1596. In Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt suggests that Shakespeare's whole career was driven, to a significant extent, by an urge to recover the status his father had lost upon the collapse of the family fortunes when William was thirteen.³

Upward mobility was possible even within the rigid early modern English class system. But few among the masses climbed far up the social ladder. Rousing his troops before the Battle of Agincourt, Shakespeare's Henry the Fifth promises:

... he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile
This day shall gentle his condition.

(4.3.61-3)

Common soldiers will, the king claims, be ennobled by their actions. But when the victorious Henry reads the list of the English dead, the roll call comprises "Edward the Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk, / Sir Richard Keightley, Davy Gam Esquire; / None else of name" (4.8.103-5). Those below the level of the gentry are simply nameless "other men."

The Prologue to Henry V apologizes for the incapacity of the bare London stage to do justice to Henry's exploits:

But pardon, gentles all.
The flat unraised spirits that hath dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object.

(1.chor.8—11)

The appeal to "gentles all" is pure flattery. The groundlings were no more transformed by the appellation than Henry's soldiers were elevated in society by their heroic deeds. Robin Goodfellow's (Puck's) plea, at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream, that the audience overlook the actors' faults may have had a firmer basis in fact: "Gentles, do not reprehend. / If you pardon, we will mend" (Epi.7-8). The "Gentles" whom Peter Quince addresses in his prologue to the "Pyramus and Thisbe" interlude (5.1.126) include Theseus, Duke of Athens, his bride Hippolyta, and their wedding guests, and it has often been supposed that A Midsummer Night's Dream itself was "designed to grace a wedding in a noble household."⁴

Besides Henry V and A Midsummer Night's Dream, there is one, and only one, other English play of the period 1575-1600 in which a prologue or epilogue asks "gentles" or "gentlemen" to "pardon" any perceived shortcomings.⁵ This is the earliest of the three, Arden of Faversham, first published anonymously in 1592, having probably been composed within the years 1588-1591.⁶ At the end of the play, Franklin steps forward to deliver an epilogue in which he recounts the fates of those implicated in the murder of his friend Thomas Arden and to apologize, in a grossly hypermetrical line, for the plainness with which the crime has been dramatized: "Gentlemen, we hope you'll pardon this naked tragedy" (Epi.14), Here again the playwright ingratiates himself with an original audience unlikely to have contained a majority of theater-goers entitled to call themselves, in any formal sense, "gentlemen." But Arden himself is twice labeled "gentle Arden" (1.401, 4.21), and every character in the play—from deus ex machina Lord Cheiny to the free-ranging criminals Black Will and Shakebag—is acutely conscious of his or her status in a hierarchical society. Indeed, like Franklin in the epilogue, the dramatis personae confer titles to curry favor; or they revile as "peasant," "churl," "knave," and "villain," those over whom they wish to assert their superiority. When the well-born Alice Arden quarrels with her lover Mosby, a jobbing-tailor who has risen to be Lord Clifford's steward, she abuses him as "[a] mean artificer, that low-born name" (8.77). Unable to bear his vituperation in response, she seeks to mollify him, eliciting his wounded sarcasm: "Make love to you? Why, 'tis unpardonable; / We beggars must not breathe where gentles are" (8.138-9); to which she replies: "Sweet Mosby is as gentle as a king," half acknowledging that this is flattery by adding "And I too blind to judge him otherwise" (8.140-41). Alice's besotted protestations are, in reality, no better able to "gentle" Mosby's "condition" and make him king-like than King Henry's martial rhetoric is able to turn his subjects into his brothers.

Arguing that "a fully informed histoncism cannot afford to overlook the way in which texts, at the level of the most intricate verbal detail, are vehicles of historical meaning," Michael Neill explored the subtle ways in which social change is reflected in "the language of status" by which the characters manipulate one another in Arden of Faversham.⁷ The actual murder of Thomas Arden in 1551 at the instigation of his adulterous wife—on which, by way of Holinshed's narrative, the play was based—became the focus of anxieties surrounding "the politics of state and the politics of gender."⁸ Political and household government are among Arden of Faversham's concerns. But the struggle for land "as both an index of rank and a fungible commodity" is, as Neill shows, crucial.⁹ Sexual possession becomes a means to material possession and social prestige. "Gentle Alice" is a pawn in the power-play between the Renaissance "new man" Arden and the ambitious Mosby. Is it possible that the creator of "gentle Arden" and "gentle Alice" was the "gentle Shakespeare"? This is not a question that deflected Neill from his attention to the play's "social vision" and the means by which "the aesthetic and the historical become effectively indivisible."¹⁰ Nor should it have done so. His essay is wonderfully illuminating. But it is the question to which I turn here. And, curiously enough, the word "gentle" helps provide an answer.

III

Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare have all, at one time or another, been proposed as sole author of Arden of Faversham.¹¹ Kyd's candidacy has recently been revived by no less a scholar than Brian Vickers, but the evidence he advances cannot sustain the conclusions that he draws.¹² What then can be said in support of the Shakespeare theory, to which Algernon Charles Swinburne and several other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century commentators subscribed?

A new book edited ...