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Dramaturgy, Ideology, and Interpretation In NOTES and BIBLIOGRAPHY -324- University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. INDEX TO SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL NOTES 326 Chapter One 326 Chapter Two 390 Chapter Three 453 Chapter Four 506 Chapter Five 547 Chapter Six 571 Chapter Seven 594 BIBLIOGRAPHY 601 Section I: Editions of Shakespeare 601 Section II: Other Literary Works 607 Section III: Criticism and Scholarship 615 -325- NOTES CHAPTER ONE 1. I have omitted the internal stage directions inserted by the Oxford editors in this passage to mark who is being addressed, since these tend to obscure, without fully solving, the problems caused by the shifting pronouns of the Soothsayer's opening speech (11. 445-454). The Folio actually lacks the first speech heading for the Soothsayer here, prefacing the prophetic text and the lines which follow it with the single word, 'Reades' (TLN 3765); but there can be no doubt from the surrounding context that it is the Soothsayer who is supposed to be speaking. The precise nature of the document he reads from, though, is somewhat perplexing - it is variously referred to as a 'tablet' (5.5. 203), a 'book' - with covers? - (5.5. 227-229), and finally, in this instance, a 'label' (1. 432). 2. The unusually lengthy "feel" of this scene is well described by Ann Thompson ('Cymbeline's Other Endings', in The Appropriation of Shakespeare, edited by Jean I. Marsden (Hemel Hempstead, 1991), pp. 203-220 (see p. 204)). Going by a simple line count, obviously not an entirely accurate indication of performing time, Cymbeline has the third longest final scene in Shakespeare, its 486 lines only being surpassed (in the Oxford text, and using the corrected line-numbering supplied in the Compact Edition of 1988) by the 538 lines of Measure for Measure, 5.1 and the mammoth 914 lines of Love's Labour's Lost, 5.2. Neither of these, however, begins to rival the fabled twenty-four denouements on offer here, and so crucial to the impact of this scene. These were first calculated and enumerated in Barrett Wendell, William Shakspere: A Study in Elizabethan Literature (London, 1894), pp. 358-361; extracts from this discussion gained more general currency through being cited in Horace Howard Furness, ed., The Tragedie of Cymbeline, A New Variorum Shakespeare (Philadelphia, 1913), p. 391. Wendell's total is dependent on definitions and inevitably remains open to question - see J. M. Nosworthy, ed., Cymbeline, The Arden Shakespeare (London, 1955; reprinted 1986), p. 164, headnote to Scene V. Whenever I try to count for myself revelations or surprises for the on-stage characters, I seem to arrive at the figure of twenty-three. 3. Compare Harley Granville-Barker's sentiments on the passage: 'one may own perhaps to a little impatience with the postscriptal Soothsayer, and the re-reading (surely once is enough!) of Jupiter's missive. We can call the whipping-boy to account if we will. These fifty lines are, in a strict view, dramatically redundant, and, at such a moment, dangerously so; this cannot be denied. Even so, there is a -326- -327- quaintness about the business which makes it a not unfitting finish to a charmingly incongruous play. It does not help to hold us spellbound in excitement to the end. But must we always insist on excitement in the theatre?' (Prefaces to Shakespeare, Second Series (London, 1930), p. 285). For Granville-Barker's 'whipping-boy' (i.e. some poor theatre hack deemed responsible for supposed interpolations in the play), see pp. 235-236. 4. The placing of the prophecy and of Jupiter's intervention so late in the action, and the little effect either has on the unravelling of the plot, are long-standing critical complaints. See, for example, Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford, 1960), pp. 283-286; Kenneth Muir, 'Theophanies in the Last Plays', in Shakespeare's Late Plays: Essays in Honor of Charles Crow, edited by Richard C. Tobias and Paul G. Zolbrod (Athens, OH, 1974), pp. 32-43 (p. 37); and also Bullough, Sources, VIII (1975), 37. Comment along the same lines from earlier critics can be found in the various negative assessments of the vision collected together by Furness (Cymbeline, pp. 374-378). Judiana Lawrence, in an important discussion of this sequence which has strongly influenced my approach, contrasts the positioning of the prophecy in Cymbeline with the treatment of the oracle in The Winter's Tale and with the use of prophecy as a staple device for initiating or propelling the action in romance literature generally ('Natural Bonds and Artistic Coherence in the Ending of Cymbeline', Shakespeare Quarterly, 35 (1984), 440-460 (see pp. 447-449)). Pointing to the handling of prophecy as an organising structural principle in the English history plays and Macbeth, she wryly observes, 'clearly, Shakespeare had little to learn about the importance of the timing of a prophecy' (p. 454). 5. That the prophecy in Cymbeline furnishes 'the only instance where the same words are read aloud twice' is a fact noted by Warren D. Smith (Shakespeare's Playhouse Practice (Hanover, NH, 1975), p. 32, note 11). Smith's statement occurs in the context of remarks relating to the on-stage reading of documents in the Shakespeare canon, which rules out such incidents as the repetitions of the impromptu epigram in Love's Labour's Lost (3.1. 82-95) or the numerous readings of the casket inscriptions in The Merchant of Venice (2.7. 4-37, 2.9. 20-57). Even so, I have found it necessary to tighten his parameters (insofar as he gives any), introducing the stress on complete repetition and a lack of interruption. Smith's passing technical observation is picked up and reaffirmed by Leah S. Marcus, in a discussion which sets about exploring the possible significances of such a repetition ('Cymbeline and the Unease of Topicality', in The Historical Renaissance, edited by Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (Chicago and London, 1988), pp. 134- 168 (see especially p. 139 and p. 163, note 14); this is an abbreviated version of the third chapter ('James', pp. 106-159) of Marcus's book, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1988) - references here are to the separate essay (henceforth, 'Unease'), preferred for its narrower focus on Cymbeline). Notes to Chapter One, pp. 26-92 -328- Marcus's treatment of both prophecy and play is extremely illuminating and I owe much to her work (including the reference to Smith). There are actually quite a few documents in Shakespearian drama, particularly letters, which get either re-read in part or quoted from by memory (with varying degrees of accuracy) after an initial full reading. But using the modified terms mentioned above, I have been unable to locate any example to contradict Smith's statement - even Falstaff's duplicated letters in The Merry Wives of Windsor only receive one on-stage reading between them (see 2.1. 1-96). However, two episodes from early in Shakespeare's career, both also relevant here in other ways (see below), come close. (1) In the conjuring scene of 2 Henry VI (a sequence of action preserved in a somewhat confused state in the surviving texts), questions from a prepared script are read to the spirit, Asnath, by Roger Bolingbroke, the spirit's replies being recorded, apparently on the same document, by (presumably) the priest, John Southwell (1.4. 24-40). The questions and their answers then get repeated together later - more or less word for word but with interposed comments - as evidence against the Duchess of Gloucester and her accomplices, though, to complicate the situation further, this repetition occurs at different points in the Quarto and Folio texts (2.1. 179-189 in the Oxford text (The First Part of the Contention), which follows the Quarto here and so has King Henry reading the lines; and 1.4. 56-67 in Michael Hattaway's New Cambridge edition (Cambridge, 1991), which prefers the Folio arrangement, where the Duke of York is responsible for the re-reading). (2) More directly comparable to the passage at hand is the sequence of dialogue with the mock construe in The Taming of the Shrew, where two lines read out from Ovid's Heroides are "interpreted" phrase by phrase by both Lucentio/Cambio and Bianca, with the effect that the text is heard three times, albeit in close succession and with two of the occasions interrupted (3.1. 26-43). 6. 'Unease', p. 139; the quotation from Smith in the previous sentence is found in Shakespeare's Playhouse Practice, p. 32, note 11. Smith speculates that the prophecy might have been set up from the very scroll used during performance. This seems implausible (if only because of problems of availability or survival), but it does raise the material question of whether the relevant section of text would actually have been inscribed on the property document(s) concerned in the first place (a likely theatrical practice, which Smith assumes as standard). With regard to the Folio presentation, Marcus appears on much firmer ground in pointing out that 'the exactitude was easily achievable in the printing house, since the same block of type could have been used both times' (p.
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