Shakespeare

The vndiscouer’d country, from whose borne

No trauiler returnes …

he seems to have forgotten that he has already seen his father’s ghost. The speech “To be, or not to be” is probably an interpolation within the text. It may have been a speech that Shakespeare composed for an earlier version of Hamlet or for another play altogether; it may have been a speech he jotted down in a table-book for unspecified later use. It was in any case too good to abandon, and so he placed it in this version of Hamlet .

His stage-directions are a good indication of his method. Sometimes they are misplaced. He abbreviates or omits them in a haphazard manner, as if the speed and urgency of his composition drove all before them. The fact that he did not write coherent notes or systematic directions is a sure sign that he knew he would be engaged in the rehearsals at some later time. All would then be made clear. He forgets to “exit” some characters, an omission that would of course have been picked up at just such a rehearsal. Sometimes he hopelessly confuses the speech-prefixes of minor characters, so that it becomes difficult to tell who is addressing whom. In King John the French king is sometimes known as Philip and sometimes Lewis. Shakespeare introduces characters who never speak at all; he may have intended them to play a part but in the quick working of his invention forgot about them entirely. In Much Ado About Nothing Leonato apparently has a wife called Innogen, but she never makes an appearance. The name reappears in Cymbeline . Sometimes he will add the stage-direction “with others,” and only gradually will the members of this unknown assembly reveal themselves in individual parts. Some of his plays seem too long for conventional or average performance. It has been suggested that these are reading versions of his dramas, but it is more probable that they are examples of allowing his invention to advance unimpeded. He had in any case no need to curb his flowing pen; he knew that cuts could be made in rehearsal. As an epistle at the beginning of Beaumont and Fletcher’s published works testifies in 1647, “When these comedies and tragedies were presented on the stage, the actors omitted some scenes and passages, with the authors’ consent, as occasion led them.” There is no reason to believe that Shakespeare reacted any differently.

It is sometimes suggested that his hesitations and inconsistencies are the mark of every dramatist. But that is not necessarily the case. Moliere, for example, has practically none. They are much more the token of Shakespeare’s uniquely fluid imagination and fluency of language. He was neither a cautious nor a deliberate artist. As the Poet confesses in Timon of Athens (21-5):

Our Poesie is as a Goume, which ouses

From whence ’tis nourisht: the fire i’th’Flint

Shewes not, till it be strooke: our gentle flame

Prouokes it selfe, and like the currant flyes

Each bound it chafes.

Poetry creates itself in the act of being created; it needs no external stimulus but provokes itself and streams forth with its own insistent momentum. He was always, as it were, in a state of suspenseful attention, not knowing precisely where he was going. That may help to explain his more than usually erratic spellings; in the manuscript of Sir Thomas More , for example, there are five different spellings of “sheriff” in five consecutive lines. The name of “More” is spelled in three different ways in the same line. It is as if he wished his meaning to be indeterminate, to be open to any and every interpretation. This was also his professional method, leaving as much as possible to the process of rehearsal and the interpretation of the player. But the effect of course is further to heighten what has been called his “invisibility” as if the words, like the oozing gum, came from some natural source.

Yet there is an apparent paradox here. In the course of revision or rewriting, he often changes the most minute details out of some general desire to polish the verse still brighter. It may have been an instinctive, and for him a barely noticed, process; but of course there were occasions when he changed the general tenor of a scene. It has already been noticed that Shakespeare continued to revise his plays throughout his career. The new Oxford edition of his plays, for example, prints two versions of King Lear composed at different times. All the evidence suggests that some of his more accomplished dramas, such as The Taming of the Shrew and King John , are rewritten versions of his earlier originals. Othello was revised in order to augment the part of Emilia; she needed to be more sympathetic in order to avert any dissatisfaction in the audience at her giving Iago the handkerchief. Iago must be the sole architect of evil in the play. Shakespeare presumably registered the ambivalent reaction of the first audiences to her role, and changed the text accordingly. There are interpolations in many of the plays; the diversion upon the misfortunes of the players in Hamlet is one example. In Romeo and Juliet the speech beginning “The grey eyed morne smiles on the frowning night” is transferred from Romeo to Friar Lawrence in a significant change of emphasis. In Love’s Labour’s Lost Berowne gives two different versions of the same speech, one much more lyrical than the other; one was presumably added in the margin, or on a separate piece of paper, at a later date without the printer noticing that the other had been cancelled.

This is a very common phenomenon in the plays of Shakespeare. There are single lines that contain intact Shakespeare’s first and second thoughts. In the second quarto of Romeo and Juliet , for example, there exists the strange and unmetrical line “Rauenous douefeatherd rauen, woluishrauening lamb”; here the process of his thought from ravenous through dove to raven is made clear; if the editor removes the first “Rauenous,” a certain sense emerges. The ending of Troilus and Cressida has been heavily restructured, and it can in fact fairly be claimed that there are few plays in which there is no evidence of rewriting or structural revision. He often cut lines at a later date. In the two sequences of history plays, concerning Henry VI and Henry IV respectively, there is some evidence that he added speeches which would knit the plays together and thus provide a more unified structure of action. He added material for plays to be performed at court, and was sometimes obliged to rewrite existing material. Thus Oldcastle became, in a later version, Falstaff. He also changed material to accommodate the changing cast of players. This need not necessarily negate the impression given by his contemporaries that he wrote speedily and easily; it implies only his plays were always in a provisional or fluid shape. It is clear enough that at some point he generally went back over what he had written. It may have been at the moment of making a fair copy for his earliest manuscript pages; it may have been at the time he revised a play for a new season of performances.

One example may stand for many. In Hamlet his first version of the Player Queen’s speech runs:

For women feare too much, euen as they loue,

And womens feare and loue hold quantitie,

Eyther none, in neither ought, or in extremitie.

But this was too prolix and confusing, so he tightened up the verses in a succeeding version (1888-9):

For womens feare and loue, holds quantitie,

In neither ought, or in extremity.

He would have had to ensure that these changes met with the approval of the actors, who of course would have had to learn the new lines; he must also have made certain that the revisions were not so drastic that the play had to be resubmitted to the Master of Revels for approval. Within these constraints, therefore, his plays were never fixed or finished; he was continually remaking them and, to the horror of editors who would prefer a definitive text, we may fairly assume that each play was slightly different at every performance.