A Return to ‘The Great Variety of Readers’: The History and Future of Reading Shakespeare A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Robin P. Williams, ma School of Arts Brunel University july 2014 williams abstract abstract a return to ‘the great variety of readers’: the history and future of reading shakespeare For almost a century Shakespeare’s work has been viewed primarily under a supremacy of performance with an insistence that Shakespeare wrote his work to be staged, not read. This prevailing view has ensured that most responses in Shakespearean research fit within this line of enquiry. The recent argument that Shakespeare was a literary dramatist who wrote for readers—as well as audiences—has met with resistance. This thesis first exposes the very literate world Shakespeare lived in and his own perception of that world, which embraces a writer who wrote for readers. The material evidence of readers begins in Shakespeare’s own lifetime and grows steadily, evidenced by the editorial methods used to facilitate reading, the profusion of books specifically for readers of general interest, and the thousands of lay reading circles formed to enjoy and study the plays. Readers of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries are shown to have spontaneously responded to the works as literature, as reading Shakespeare aloud within a family or social circle has a tenacious history. For three hundred years after Shakespeare’s death it was readers and Shakespeare reading groups who created and maintained Shakespeare’s legacy as a literary icon and national hero. The history of millions of lay readers reading aloud in community was engulfed by the transition of the texts into academia and performance criticism until by the 1940s Shakespeare reading groups were virtually non-existent. A new genre of editorial practice can support a re-emergence of community reading and point toward a greater acceptance of Shakespeare as a literary dramatist, enlarging the field of Shakespearean scholarship and criticism. A prototype of a Readers’ Edition of a Shakespearean play specifically edited and designed for reading aloud in groups is included with this thesis. 2 contents Abstract ..................................................................... 2 Acknowledgements ....................................................... 4 Abbreviations .............................................................. 5 List of Illustrations ........................................................ 6 Preliminary Notes ......................................................... 7 Introduction. 12 part i the foundations of a literary possibility 1 Literacy in Shakespeare’s World and Plays ...........................28 2 Seventeenth-Century Readers .........................................55 part ii editing and reading the literary shakespeare 3 The Growth of Shakespearean Editions ..............................71 4 The Growth of Shakespearean Readers ...............................96 5 Shakespeare for the Rest of Us .......................................116 6 Reading Shakespeare in Community ...............................154 part iii editing and reading shakespeare today 7 The Rise of Scholars and Demise of Readers .......................187 8 The Development of Readers’ Editions .............................207 part iv conclusion and backmatter 9 Conclusion ..............................................................238 Appendix A: Readers’ Editions Layout and Features .............246 Appendix B: Readers’ Editions Apparatus Samples ..............248 Bibliography .............................................................251 3 williams acknowledgements acknowledgements I wish to thank my supervisor, William Leahy, who provided tremendous support and encouragement throughout this project, as well as Sean Gaston whose notes on the final draft were invaluable. I also thank Kristin Bundesen, my local supervisor in Santa Fe, New Mexico, who was instrumental in helping me shape and define this thesis. I thank Lukas Erne for reviewing an early copy of my Readers’ Edition prototype, The Comedy of Errors, and for providing critical feedback. My home team support was a constant source of kindness and encouragement: my mother Pat Williams and my dad Gerald Williams who is gone but would have been thrilled, my children Ryan, Jimmy, Scarlett and Matt, my sweet heart John Tollett, as well as Jean and John Cheek, Anna Darrah, John Gardner, Joseph Hall, Edie Murphy, Jody Shepard, Teresa Toole, Elizabeth West, and the entire reading group of the Santa Fe Shakespeare Close Readers. I also thank my First Friday Club readers, the Renesan Readers, and the reading groups across the country who provided information about how their circles operate today. 4 williams abbreviations abbreviations The abbreviations for Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets are those used by the Modern Language Association of America and adopted for this thesis.1 aww All’s Well That Ends Well oth Othello ant Antony and Cleopatra per Pericles ayl As You Like It r2 Richard ii err Comedy of Errors r3 Richard iii cor Coriolanus rom Romeo and Juliet cym Cymbeline son Sonnets ham Hamlet shr Taming of the Shrew 1h4 Henry iv, Part One tmp Tempest 2h4 Henry iv, Part Two tim Timon of Athens h5 Henry v tit Titus Andronicus 1h6 Henry vi, Part One tro Troilus and Cressida 2h6 Henry vi, Part Two tn Twelfth Night 3h6 Henry vi, Part Three tgv Two Gentlemen of Verona h8 Henry viii wt Winter’s Tale jc Julius Caesar . jn King John Other abbreviations lr King Lear f1 First Folio, 1623 lll Love’s Labour’s Lost f2 Second Folio, 1632 mac Macbeth f3 Third Folio, 1664 mm Measure for Measure f4 Fourth Folio, 1685s mv Merchant of Venice q1 First Quarto of a play wiv Merry Wives of Windsor q2 Second Quarto of a play mnd Midsummer Night’s Dream oed Oxford English Dictionary ado Much Ado about Nothing dnb Dictionary of National Biography All line numbers are from David Bevington, ed., The Collected Works of Shakespeare, 6th ed. (London: Pearson Education, Inc., 2009). Quotations with original punctuation and capitalization are from the First Folio unless otherwise noted. 1 Richard Knowles, ed., Shakespeare Variorum Handbook: A Manual of Editorial Practice, 2nd ed. (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2003), 133–34, http://www.mla.org/ variorum_handbook. 5 williams list of illustrations list of illustrations Fig. 1: Preface to Shakespeare’s First Folio ...................................11 Fig. 2: Printed and handwritten title, The Taming of a Shrew .............33 Fig. 3: Clipping from First Folio, Antony and Cleopatra ................221 Fig. 4: Clipping from Oxford Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra ....221 Fig. 5: Clipping from Riverside Shakespeare, Comedy of Errors . .223 Fig. 6: Clipping from Readers’ Edition, Comedy of Errors ..............223 Fig. 7: Stage directions, Believe as you List .................................227 6 williams preliminary notes preliminary notes The wordsShakespeare and Shakespearean have been spelled in a variety of ways in the past four hundred years. Throughout this thesis I have used the spelling as found in the original citation or title. It may appear as Shakespear, Shakspear, Shakspere, Shaksper, Shackspeare, Shaksperean, Shakspearean, Shakespearian, Shakespearean, etc. Research is limited to England and the United States. Although there were active publishing industries in Scotland and Ireland supplying Shakespearean texts to the colonies, they are beyond the scope of this thesis. This thesis is limited to Shakespeare’s plays and does not reach to the narrative poems or sonnets. Some of the research in chapter six first appeared under my pseudonym, Thane Whetstone, with William Leahy as ‘Women’s Clubs and Shakespeare in America’ in Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations 15 (Oct 2011): 193–204. definitions This section clarifies how certain words are defined and used in the argumentative narrative of this thesis. The termliterature is used as the oed 3.b defines it: ‘written work valued for superior or lasting artistic merit’, with the specific adjunct in this thesis that as ‘written’ work it is therefore to be read, and as ‘lasting’, generally read more than once. Literary is also used as the oed a.1 defines it: ‘of or relating to the writing, study, or content of literature, especially of the kind valued for quality of form; of the nature of literature’.1 This definition also explicitly refers to the written work as read, as opposed to a performance of a written work. The phrase page‘ versus stage’ is used often in the context of Shakespeare’s supposed 1. A quotation under this definition provides a very interesting and pertinent division ofliterature: ‘1852 A. Edgar Tusculana 111—Literature may be divided into two great classes, the popular, and the learned or exclusive. Many persons who consider the matter superficially will no doubt regard the former as a very insignificant division; but to us it appears to be by much the more important, and to be that which really and substantially constitutes literature’. This is a reminder of the remarkable situation of Shakespeare’s works that, for three centuries, crossed the boundary between ‘popular’ and ‘learned’. 7 williams preliminary notes intentions, whether he wrote his plays to be performed on stage or read on the page, or in the context of our interaction with the text, either through performance on the stage or through reading the page. In this thesis, page refers to its material function