The Folio and the idea of the single author
The Folio publication did not only preserve Shakespeare’s work. By treasuring up the loose play scripts in a single massive volume which could not easily be held in the hand, but had rather to be laid on a desk, or displayed on a shelf, our two editor-heroes also radically altered the nature of the work, and permanently influenced the world’s perception of the Bard. The Folio publication removed the plays from the dynamic, interactive and textually unstable context of a stage performance where they had been born and had hitherto had their being, to the silent, contemplative and awed – if sometimes critical – atmosphere of the study or private library, where they could be reverently pored over. This transference had the effect not only of freezing the wording of the former playscripts, but also of fixing, as in amber, the apparently single identity of the author.
On the famous title page of the Folio, the editors claim that the plays are “published according to the True Original Copies”, and in their preface they claim that, whereas heretofore their readers had been “abused with diverse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed and defamed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious imposters”, the texts they were offering in the Folio were “cur’d and perfect of their limbes, absolute in their numbers [syllables, poetic music], as he conceived them.” He was of course the person whose name they engraved on the cover of their beautiful artefact. Inevitably, they launched the perception that the texts are the sacred and unalterable creation of a single and inspired imagination, that of William Shakespeare. On reflection, it is hard to believe that two members of the King’s Men, the company of actors to which Shakespeare belonged, could have made these claims without at least one conspiratorial nudge and wink. Together with the legendary Richard Burbage, Henry Condell was a principal actor among the King’s Men and he probably appeared in every one of Shakespeare’s plays. Both editors would have had intimate knowledge of just how the company’s scripts came into being.
The King’s Men were a competitive commercial enterprise, concerned with ‘bums on seats’ and cash in the bank, and the hyperbole and puff of their Folio preface must perhaps be seen as part of their promotion of the ambitious business venture they were undertaking in publishing the plays. Let me pause here to say that I have no intention of arguing that Shakespeare was not the author of his plays, much less that he was really Francis Bacon, or James I, or “not Shakespeare at all, but somebody else of the same name”, as an inspired schoolboy once argued. Nor will I go to the length of deconstructing his authorship to the extent that may be done with Homer, or the Bible, both of which are the products of multiple authors composing over hundreds of years, with deep origins in an oral tradition. While the documentary evidence for Shakespeare’s existence is extremely slender – maybe six or eight objective and establishable facts – I believe it is meaningful to speak of William Shakespeare, poet and playwright, while remaining somewhat agnostic as to whether what we read today represents with a high degree of accuracy what Shakespeare himself actually wrote. Without a doubt, the plays as we have them today cannot be taken as direct unmediated emanations from his mind alone.
Shakespeare appears to have had no interest in asserting exclusive authorial rights over his scripts. He was a shareholder in the King’s Men who, like all the other theatrical companies at the time, were the legal owners of the plays which they produced as well as of such copyright as then existed. The journey between playwright’s pen and published text is a long and complex one, and if we – after centuries of scholarly endeavour – peel away some of the single-author myth, it is possible now to unravel the probable creative process by which the plays came into their final form. A Shakespeare play would have begun with an author’s draft – but it was a draft only. It was a working script, which in repertory would come to deserve its description as “foul papers”, as it became covered in crossings out, insertions, and general “blotting”. These amendments and marginalia were the marks left by a company of actors in creative collaboration, as they tried out in the few brief rehearsals allowed them what the playwright had put before them, and made their own suggestions as they went along. The script might continually be reshaped by endless revisions both major and minor, with probably no final veto power for any member of the team, even if he were the author himself. Again, there is no evidence that Shakespeare disagreed in any way with this practice. As in this lecture tonight, collective composition was the order of the day.
Only once this process of co-creative ferment was over, or at least well advanced, would the author (or a professional scribe) produce the so-called “fair copy”. This would be annotated with stage directions and pass into the hands of the company, who would submit it to the Master of the Revels for licensing. It might well be returned with the Master’s own notes and further changes required – including instances of censorship. Once licensed, the fair copy of a script would become “the book of the play”, or the promptbook. Only one or two full copies would be made, and these would be the only authorial versions of the play. Certainly none of the actors would have had complete copies. To reduce expenses, and also to avoid the risk of unauthorised publication, each actor would have received only his own part, along with his cue lines. Shakespeare humorously alludes to this in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (3.1.80-88), where he has the naïve “mechanicals” read all their lines in one go.
Adjustments to the text concerning emphasis, stage business, tone of delivery, pacing, and even the odd cut or interpolation probably continued to be made throughout the brief rehearsal process. Some of these would have remained unrecorded – the kind of invisible para-text that develops amongst a company of actors at work – but some of them would have been written into the promptbook, becoming part of the ever-evolving text. The order of scenes may well have been fluid at this stage. It was only in the First Folio that the plays became divided into numbered acts and scenes – another aspect of its importance. Even in the later stages of production, it seems likely that Shakespeare would have had to accept the possibility of adaptation to suit a particular occasion. When we consider the two-and-a-half hours of performing time available during English daylight hours, and the length of some of Shakespeare’s plays, it seems that he sometimes deliberately offered his fellow actors more than they could use on any single occasion. Greenblatt writes (67): “There is an imaginative generosity in many of Shakespeare’s scripts, as if he were deliberately offering his fellow actors ... abundant materials with which to reconceive and revivify each play again and again, as they or their audiences liked it.”[2] This generosity, however, shows Shakespeare even further relinquishing his authorial hold on the script. The abundance that he offers, while not all being useable by the Elizabethan actor, has of course become a limitless treasure trove for later Shakespeare lovers.
During performance there was yet more room for “corruption” of the text. The scripts were written to be performed by players before an audience, in a relationship that gave wide scope for “contamination”. Think of the thrust stage of the Globe – interactive. There are several examples in the plays of an awareness of the role of audience. Shakespeare never forgot the importance of that audience response which alone gives life to a script, and, as any actor will know, may produce strange variations from performance to performance.
When, some years after Shakespeare’s death, his literary heirs hatched the plan to collect and publish the plays in a single staggering volume, yet another round of collaborative editing occurred. We have no surviving foul papers, no fair copies, and no prompt books, but Heminges and Condell would have had access to all the messy manuscripts stored by the King’s Men. From these they would have assembled their “True Original Copies” for publication, selecting and editing as they went, “curing and perfecting the limbes”, and finally presenting the scripts as he ostensibly conceived them. In applying the seal of his name to the plays, the input of the company at large – ironically, their own input – became subsumed in the project of promoting a single, authoritative and marketable identity as author.
If no contemporary manuscript survives which can verify these many layers of mediation, how dare we speculate in this way about the scripts? Most of this kind of research rests on the existence of a handful of separately printed quarto editions from Shakespeare’s own lifetime which (obviously) predate the First Folio. Six of the major works are available to us in this form (Hamlet, Othello, 2 Henry IV, King Lear, Richard II and Troilus and Cressida), and when these quarto versions are compared with the versions in the Folio, they reveal hundreds of variant readings. From these variants, scholars deduce the multifaceted process of creation, reconstructing each play’s journey from manuscript to print. It becomes evident that different plays took very different journeys before they reached their final form in the hands of two daring editors and a London printer, and became immortalised as the genius of one man.
Even if Shakespeare was not the sole, uniquely inspired author of the plays, readers everywhere and at all times have had little difficulty in recognising that the plays possess a unique poetic power. Even if he was only the leading member of a collective enterprise, there is no question that the King’s Men possessed a singular human treasure among their number. While Heminges and Condell may have nudged each other when claiming that the Folio contained the true and original scripts as Shakespeare conceived them, they would surely not have hesitated to call down immortality on this one member of the team.
