Shakespeare / Text

Contemporary Readings in Textual Studies, Editing and Performance

Claire M. L. Bourne, Sonia Massai, Farah Karim Cooper, Gordon McMullan, Lucy Munro

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781350344556
• eBook ISBN: 9781350128156
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

Shakespeare / Text sets new agendas for the study and use of the Shakespearean text. Written by 20 leading experts on textual matters, each chapter challenges a single entrenched binary – such as book/theatre, source/adaptation, text/paratext, canon/apocrypha, sense/nonsense, extant/ephemeral, material/digital and original/copy – that has come to both define and limit the way we read, analyze, teach, perform and edit Shakespeare today. Drawing on methods from book history, bibliography, editorial theory, library science, the digital humanities, theatre studies and literary criticism, the collection as a whole proposes that our understanding of Shakespeare – and early modern drama more broadly – changes radically when 'either/or' approaches to the Shakespearean text are reconfigured. The chapters in Shakespeare / Text make strong cases for challenging received wisdom and offer new, portable methods of treating 'the text', in its myriad instantiations, that will be useful to scholars, editors, theatre practitioners, teachers and librarians.

Part One

Inclusive / exclusive

1

Fair / foul

B. K. Adams

[I]t is unwise to draw a priori conclusions as to the unauthorized nature of whole groups of plays … [E]ach text must be fairly judged on its own evidence, and with an understanding of the typographical ideals and practices of the time.

Evelyn May Albright, 1927¹

When asked to determine the relationship between fair / foul and their relation to the Shakespearean text, I turned to the title of this volume to consider what kinds of connections these sets of terms could have with one another. When I considered how Shakespeare / text and fair / foul operate as discrete binaries, my immediate assumption was that book history and bibliography govern their associations. Regarded in this way (that is, in the context of scholarly tradition), these two sets of terms gesture towards the thorny history of ‘fair’ and ‘foul’ papers (the supposed manuscripts behind the printed texts of Shakespeare’s plays), including the tenuous yet persistent linking of extant non-Shakespearean drama in manuscript to printed versions of Shakespearean drama. This specific narrative of fair / foul originated with W. W. Greg’s ‘discovery’ of foul (‘fowle’) papers in 1925 and was extended by A. W. Pollard’s initial rejection of the findings and J. Dover Wilson’s subsequent acceptance and promotion of Greg’s theory.² The fervency of Dover Wilson’s embrace of the theory made it a cornerstone in textual scholarship and editorial practices until fairly recently. But methods that assume ‘foul’ (draft) copy or ‘fair’ (polished) copy behind early editions have come under increasing scrutiny in the work of Paul Werstine and Tiffany Stern, among others.³ Though necessary, the discussions about the relative correctness of the terms – particularly with regard to their implementation in theatre history, book history and bibliography – unfortunately crowd out the unquestioned comfort with wider structural inequities in the field that undergird their very ideology and use. Foul papers, at least to me, have come to represent far more than Greg’s notion of, in Werstine’s paraphrase, ‘a copy representing the play more or less as the author intended it to stand, but not itself clear or tidy enough to serve as a prompt-book’.⁴ The labels ‘fair’ and ‘foul’ epitomize fundamentally different approaches to archive material, the consistent privileging of Shakespeare and a history of codified speculation based on imperfect archival evidence that, while compelling, ultimately overshadowed legitimate push-back by less influential scholars at the time the terms were gaining traction.

In order to understand the persistent editorial dependence upon the expression ‘foul papers’ to make claims about textual legitimacy, I examine the histories and intimate connections of the terms fair / foul to each other – and ultimately to Shakespeare / text. I track their analogic reworking over time to show how they are used within book historical and bibliographical contexts to reproduce ideologies of race and gender (often imbricated) in early modern England. The goal here is to question the very assumptions that guide our interactions with early manuscript and printed playbooks and to shift the way we approach the archives that house this material. What’s at stake, then, are the very founding principles of bibliography, as well as fields like book history and critical editing that build from its findings. Indeed, a closer, more critical, examination of the terms ‘fair’ and ‘foul’ stands to illuminate Shakespeare’s cultural ascendancy and positioning as the standard by which so much textual scholarship is measured.

I do not reconsider foundational scholarship to erase it; rather, by dismantling (or at least examining) the binaries and paradigms intrinsic to this body of work, I hope that scholars will be able to recognize more readily the political power of the archives as well as some of the inherent unfair structural barriers located in the field. To move forwards as bibliographers and book historians, we must collectively question such terms so that these fields may welcome and include more researchers and theories of textual history.⁵

*

Instead of relying upon the exact binary fair / foul, here is what happens when I reconfigure the two sets of terms – from the title of this volume and the title of this chapter – in analogic form:

Shakespeare: text:: fair: foul

In other words, Shakespeare is to text as fair is to foul. This configuration, I think, disconnects the terms just enough to open up the pairings to a new sort of scrutiny. What is it about these two sets of terms that changes once the implied ‘and’ between words becomes something more akin to an ‘is to’? How exactly do the relationships among these words change? As an analogy, the primary terms (Shakespeare and fair) and secondary terms (text and foul) read as having relational connections. My particular arrangement of the terms into a function of an analogy exemplifies what James P. Blevins and Juliet Blevins have identified as illustrating a ‘systematic structural similarity independent of perceptual similarity’, which, as a result, may ‘yield novel inferences about the world’.⁶ Now, it is certainly possible for the analogy above to be dismissed as faulty due to preconceived notions about the terms themselves; however, I suggest that organizing them in this way allows for unexpected inferences that can challenge received wisdom about them. This new analogy encourages the following questions: How does this formation unbind these terms from traditional book history and bibliography? What changes (or does not change) about our perspective upon the arrangement of the terms in this way? What does it mean for all texts to be as ‘foul’ as Shakespeare is ‘fair’? What does it mean to consider Shakespeare – whatever that name means – in terms of fair(ness)?

By troubling the binary fair / foul by relating it directly to Shakespeare / text, I am allowing myself to examine a broader definition of fair(ness) as something more than a clean presentation copy of a manuscript or a less-noticed by-product in the history of foul papers. This new analogic grouping permits the term ‘fair’ to inherit Kim F. Hall’s meticulously researched definition of it as ‘the site of crucial delineations of cultural difference’ in early modern England.⁷ This inheritance immediately revolutionizes a concept that once seemed purely descriptive and uncontroversial: an intangible pleasantness, generic chasteness or clear handwriting. Fair(ness) becomes far more than the OED’s flat sense of ‘appearance, colour, personal qualities or attributes, etc.’.⁸ Extending Hall’s definition, I suggest that fairness in early modern England was an endogenous somatic marker of race and difference that was both anchored in ideals of physical beauty and fecundity circumscribed by whiteness and also maintained by economic and social mobility. As a linguistic and somatic marker of power and class structures that often passes as innocuous, or at the very least neutral, fairness was a measure against which early modern English people scrutinized and regulated racial others and also, perhaps more importantly, whiteness itself.

Early modern English readers could bear witness to the implicit power of fairness in Roger Ascham’s work The Scholemaster (1570), where he implores parents of the nobility to educate their sons properly in order to maintain their rightful stations. By studying with schoolmasters in the Ascham mould, students would eventually have and maintain qualities that were

full, & hable to do their office: as, a tong, not stamering, or ouer hardlie drawing forth wordes, but plaine, and redie to deliuer the meaning of the minde: a voice, not softe, weake, piping, womannishe, but audible, stronge, and manlike: a countenance, not werishe and crabbed, but faire and cumlie: a personage, not wretched and deformed, but taule and goodlie.⁹

The ideal young graduate under Ascham’s charge must be able-bodied, strong-voiced, ‘manlike’ and ‘faire’. Only a man who meets these criteria can represent the zenith of humanity. Noting that many university students do not fit this description, Ascham laments that families do not send their fairest sons to study, thus leaving the university with weaker men:

For, if a father haue foure sonnes, three faire and well formed both mynde and bodie, the fourth, wretched, lame, and deformed, his choice shalbe, to put the worst to learning, as one good enoughe to becum a scholer[.]¹⁰

Ascham ascribes to fairness an inherent worth and lays bare the cultural anxieties about its relationship to fitness and whiteness. Ascham’s observations about ‘fair’, ‘goodlie’ and ‘well formed’ sons exemplify Hall’s observation in Things of Darkness (1995) that the rhetoric of fairness establishes social boundaries. Ascham employs fairness in a way that recalls what Hall identifies in texts including Thomas Elyot’s The Boke named the Governor (1531), that is, both through tropes of darker or malformed figures and through writers’ anxieties about the connection between fairness and their own economic or political ambitions. Through methodical studies of early modern visual art as well as multiple literary genres including sonnets, romances (such as Mary Wroth’s Urania) and travel narratives, Hall illustrates the rhetorical effect – and affect – of fairness as well as its immense economic and social value in early modern England.¹¹

To be described as fair as a woman or a man in early modern England was, among other things, to be the subject of sonnets, epigrams and even the object of desire in a play. However, as Hall writes, it is also to be ‘racialized in connection with the ideologies of nationhood and physical beauty’.¹² According to this logic, the health of the nation, its future citizens and its prosperity are metonymically bound to a sense of racial purity in which fairness is the apotheosis of early modern English whiteness. The implication of ‘fairness’ (as a marker of moral and physical beauty) in discourses of racial purity is most prominently on display in lyric blazons. For example, Edmund Spenser captures this element efficiently in Sonnet 15 of his Amoretti (1595):

For loe my loue doth in her selfe containe

all this worlds riches that may farre be found,

if Saphyres, loe her eies be Saphyres plaine,

if Rubies, loe hir lips be Rubies sound:

If Pearles, hir teeth be pearles both pure and round;

if Yuorie, her forhead yuory weene;

if Gold, her locks are finest gold on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Figures
• Notes on contributors
• Series preface
• Introduction
• Part One: Inclusive / exclusive
• Part Two: Before / after
• Part Three: Authorized / unauthorized
• Part Four: Present / absent
• Index
• Imprint