Remediating Shakespeare in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries [1st ed.] 978-3-030-22836-1;978-3-030-22837-8

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xiii
Introduction: “Shakespeare himself” (Howard Marchitello)....Pages 1-29
Monumental Shakespeare (Howard Marchitello)....Pages 31-64
Redaction (Howard Marchitello)....Pages 65-90
Retelling (Howard Marchitello)....Pages 91-130
Lamb’s Lear (Howard Marchitello)....Pages 131-162
Design and the Fate of Character (Howard Marchitello)....Pages 163-200
Conclusion: The Time of Remediation (Howard Marchitello)....Pages 201-212
Back Matter ....Pages 213-230

Citation preview

Remediating Shakespeare in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Howard Marchitello

Remediating Shakespeare in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Howard Marchitello

Remediating Shakespeare in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Howard Marchitello Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Rutgers University–Camden Camden, NJ, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-22836-1 ISBN 978-3-030-22837-8  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22837-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Album/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

I will conclude by saying of Shakespeare that, with all his faults, and with all the irregularity of his Drama, one may look upon his works, in comparison of those that are more finish’d and regular, as upon an ancient majestick piece of Gothicke Architecture compar’d with a neat Modern building; the latter is more elegant and glaring, but the former is more strong and solemn. It must be allow’d that in one of these there are materials enough to make many of the other. It has much the greater variety, and much the nobler apartments; tho’ we are often conducted to them by dark, odd, and uncouth passages. Nor does the whole fail to strike us with greater reverence, tho’ many of the Parts are childish, ill-plac’d, and unequal to its grandeur. —Alexander Pope’s Preface to The Works of Shakespeare (1725)

To my father and in memory of my mother.

Acknowledgements

As is customary—and right and gratifying—I would like to offer my thanks to the following colleagues and institutions for their generous support that helped enable the writing of this book. Close to home, my thanks to my former Dean, Kriste Lindenmeyer, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University–Camden, and the Rutgers University Research Council for funding that allowed me release time and travel to archives that were invaluable as I worked on the remediations of Shakespeare that have been something of a private obsession for me for many years. I also benefitted from research time afforded by a Folger Shakespeare Library Short-term Fellowship; the Folger has long been a welcoming and sustaining setting and I thank the friends and fellow researchers who contribute to this uniquely enriching locus of intellectual energy and serenity in a city that at the moment is sorely lacking in both. It has been my good fortune to present early versions of portions of this work in conferences in recent years. Special thanks are due to the many colleagues in the justly renowned seminars of the Shakespeare Association of America whose commentary and suggestions have led to many improvements in this project. (I recall with immense fondness a seminar on Shakespeare for children, led by Naomi Miller, an event that featured two writers—and two important remediators of Shakespeare’s plays—whose work has been at my side and in my head and in my heart since: Bruce Coville and Lois Burdett.) An earlier version of Chapter 1 appeared as “Finding Cardenio” in ELH: English Literary History. 74 (2007): 957–87; ix

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Acknowledgements

a small portion of Chapter 4 appeared in “Descending Shakespeare: Toward a Theory of Adaptation for Children,” in Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults, ed. Naomi Miller (Routledge 2003): 180–89. I would like to extend thanks to my students, undergraduate and graduate, who have thought through the problems of remediation with me in classes and seminars over the years. The readers for the press offered valuable suggestions that have helped to make this a better book than it would have been without their care and insights. Special thanks to Stephen Orgel, Robert Baldock, Ben Doyle, Bethany Lawton, and to Allie (Bochicchio) Troyanos and the editorial and production teams at Palgrave. Finally, and as is also customary, I have saved these last thanks for those people who are first for me: my wife and most favored colleague Lynne Vallone, for her innumerable graces—big and small—that have enriched my work and, more importantly, my life for these thirty-five years and counting; and to my son Max and daughter Rose, and now, to Annie and Pete, who to our great joy round out la famiglia.

Contents

1 Introduction: “Shakespeare himself” 1 2 Monumental Shakespeare 31 3 Redaction 65 4 Retelling 91 5 Lamb’s Lear 131 6 Design and the Fate of Character 163 7 Conclusion: The Time of Remediation 201 Bibliography 213 Index 225

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2

“Shakespeare’s last play” (By permission, Folger Shakespeare Library) David Garrick Memorial, Westminster Abbey (Copyright: Dean and Chapter of Westminster) From “Hamlet,” Tales from Shakespeare (1807) (By permission, Folger Shakespeare Library) Alexander Christie, Othello’s Despair (By permission, University of Leeds) Titian, Presentation of the Virgin (1534–1538) (By permission, Accademia Venezia) Cima da Conegliano, Presentation of the Virgin at the Temple (ca. 1500) (By permission, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden)

5 92 109 172 202 204

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: “Shakespeare himself”

In his 1885 memoir Behind the Footlights, W. C. Day recalls with an almost palpable wistfulness the ending of a certain seaside summer many years gone by. “The autumn of 1847 had far advanced,” Day writes, “the Margate steamers had ceased running for a fortnight, and the wagonettes, promising tourists a trip round the Isle of Thanet for half-a-crown, had all been taken off the road, and the horses turned out to grass and rheumatism.”1 The passing of summer marks both the ending of the resort season and the impending arrival of yet another long winter, with its cold and its storms: the “ramshackle caravans … had been many days since stowed away in mossroofed outbuildings,” and all of the “bathing machines had been removed from the lonely beach to secure them from the damaging storms of winter” (Day, 60). All seems desolation: “In a word, the season had gone, the year’s holiday was at an end, and everyone was preparing to get back to town and resume the business of everyday life” (Day, 60). And even the thought of “everyday life” strikes for Day a somber note, since the end of the holiday season would mean financial hard times for this amateur actor and theater producer. One can linger at the seaside for only so long, caught in the “labyrinth of perplexity,” as Day evidently was, before of necessity having to decide “how the budget for the coming winter was to be framed so as adequately to provide the needful ways and means” (Day, 60). Day’s mentions of budget and “ways and means” feel at first a bit of an intrusion, the cold realities of insufficient cash shouldering aside an © The Author(s) 2019 H. Marchitello, Remediating Shakespeare in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22837-8_1

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autumnal melancholy, but as the recollection continues to unfold, these intrusions of the real world of income and outflow also appear to function as a pivot upon which the tone and the direction of the memoir turn. While out walking and “Brooding” on his financial state of affairs—the rent due, the money owed the butcher and the laundress—Day has the happy good fortune to stumble upon a Bow Street bookseller’s shop that contains (among the portraits, newspapers, and playbills) a large trove of old playbooks and among these volumes “of such remote date as to claim the distinction of curios” Day finds one in particular—“a dark blue paper covered pamphlet, whose worn and greasy condition bore unmistakable evidence of antiquity” and labeled by the bookseller with a most arresting notice: “[t]he last production of the immortal Shakespeare, 2 s. 6d. only” (Day, 61). Day is transfixed; he carefully and with great detail describes the elaborate title page of his discovery: ‘Double Falsehood; or, The Distrest Lovers.’ A Play as it is acted in the Theatre Royal in Drury-lane. Written originally by W. Shakespeare; and now revised and adapted to the Stage by Mr. Theobald, the author of ‘Shakespeare Restor’d.’ London: Printed by J. Watts, at the Printing-office in Wild-court, Lincoln’s-inn-fields. MDCCXXVIII. (Day, 61)2

Thence follows an inventory the paratextual matters: the dramatis personae, the prologue, and epilogue spoken on the play’s opening night, Theobald’s Preface in which he details how he came into possession of the text upon which he dedicated his adaptive labors. In what we quickly come to recognize as mock amazement (for this discovery has now chased away the autumnal sadness—and with it the immediate worries of budget, for he senses opportunity) Day declares, “Here was an El Dorado; an original play of the ‘Divine William’—his last production, too—lost to the stage for 120 years, and last, though not by any means least, its authenticity guaranteed by the autograph of a monarch!” (Day, 61–62).3 Day mocks not only at Lewis Theobald’s claim to a lost Shakespearean original for his play but also the attempt to legitimize that claim in the form of a royal patent, issued in the name of King George II, granting Theobald exclusive rights to the play for a term of fourteen years.4 Day’s dismissive irony is not sufficiently serious, however, to prevent him from following what he clearly understood to be Theobald’s lead in both forgery and opportunistic self-promotion, determining immediately that “[s]uch an opportunity for the manufacture of a little ‘sugar’ was not to be heedlessly

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thrown aside” (Day, 62).5 Day and an associate lease the Theatre Royal Olympic for one night’s performance (with “the option of indefinite continuance should the public trout accept the fly”) and promote the event through “a flaming playbill [that] let the cat out of the bag in the following interesting terms: SHAKESPEARE’S LAST PLAY” (Day, 62). The playbill then offers a further account of the play that reads, in part: The last production of the Immortal SHAKESPEARE! Discovered in MS., in the handwriting of Downes, the famous prompter, sixty years after his death, by the celebrated LEWIS THEOBALD, and by him presented to His Majesty George I., in 1726, whose successor, George II, in the ensuing year, approving its authenticity, granted to its restorer His Royal Letters Patent for its publication; who accordingly produced it at Drury-lane Theatre forthwith; embracing in its cast the names of Booth, Wilks, and other celebrated actors of that day. Its immense success and brilliant reception only received a check in the lamented death of its patron, since which time The Play has been lost to the world! (Day, 62–63)6

The evening of the performance arrives and the players are prepared to bring the doubly lost play to the stage. But recalling the lead up to the curtain, Day also confesses to having had an early omen of the impending disaster: mingling anonymously with the people gathered outside the doors of the theater beforehand, Day overhears in the “buzz of conversation” what he calls “ominous epithets”—“‘a get-up,’ ‘swindle,’ a ‘do,’ ‘humbug,’ ‘another Ireland forgery’”—that collectively serve to give “fearful presage of a looming storm” (Day, 64). Day begins to suspect that he has traded the winter storms at the seaside for a theatrical tempest in the city, one reminiscent (as the invocation of “another Ireland forgery” makes clear) of an even more notorious theatrical disaster, the April 1796 catastrophe of Vortigern and Rowena, an event that perhaps haunts Day’s own presentation.7 And indeed, almost immediately the prospects of success for Double Falsehood sour: upon the first entrance of Duke Angelo, his son Roderick, and a number of courtiers, one of the latter is recognized by a member of the audience who calls to him, “Hallo, Jim!” and this call is acknowledged

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by the player who “deliberately singled out his friend and returned the salutation with, ‘All right, old boy,’ and a familiar nod of the head” (Day, 65). Though recalling the event from some forty years on, Day “can vividly remember, even at this lapse of years, the effect this sally produced, and recall the sudden sinking of my hopes as the conviction flashed across me that the game was up, and Double Falsehood an irretrievably gone coon” (Day, 65). The succeeding several paragraphs of Day’s memoir recount many similar moments in which the players and, he is quite clear, the play itself fail to “silence the jokers and master the discontents” (Day, 65), culminating in the moment at which “Miss Fanny Hamilton ([playing the part of] Violante),” “a lady to whom Nature had been no niggard in the matter of flesh and muscle, as she scaled about fourteen stone,” appeared disguised as a shepherd boy “attired in light green-coloured pants.” On her exclamation, “How his eyes shake fire, and measure every piece of youth about me,” the audience, Day reports, “was … thrown entirely out of balance, and all hope of attention and enlisting further interest in the story at an end” (Day, 66). After the final curtain, Day and his partner are counting receipts in their dressing room when they hear laughter, “slight applause,” and the cry of “Manager,” followed immediately by the cry of “Author.” This was an idea, Day offers, that “so tickled the audience that the majority refused to leave without a response being made” (Day, 66). The suitably theatrical—and comical—response comes from Day’s (unnamed) partner, who “hurried to the green-room, where on a rickety shelf over the fireplace figured a lifesize plaster bust of the Immortal Bard. Hastily reaching it down, covered with dust an inch thick which he did not wait to remove, he strode majestically on the stage and held it out to the audience. Such a peal of laughter greeted this audacity as completely drowned the indignant hisses of a few reverential malcontents. … And thus ended our stage representation of SHAKESPEARE’S LAST PLAY” (Day, 66–67) (Fig. 1.1). Day’s account of his staging of Double Falsehood—like his memoir recalling a lifelong engagement with the theater more generally—is one of countless such narratives that fueled the popular press throughout the nineteenth century and beyond; at the same time, however, it provides an uncannily apposite epitome of a constellation of issues and challenges that obtain in the history of our cultural engagement with Shakespeare. This is especially true with regard to what can be called the afterlife of Shakespeare, a phrase (and a concept) that includes a vast array of desires, motivations,

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Fig. 1.1 “Shakespeare’s last play” (By permission, Folger Shakespeare Library)

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and dreams that have defined and continue to define our understanding of “Shakespeare” and, more particularly still, what we have been willing to undertake in Shakespeare’s name. The self-consciously theatrical gesture of offering the plaster bust of Shakespeare in response to the audience’s ironic call of “Author,” for instance, is an effective piece of comedy, but in order for that comedy to function, the bust itself has to have occupied a place within a complex network of significations. The bust can stand as a figure of the author because it is a monument to that author. And the Shakespeare monument is itself embedded with a complex set of practices dedicated to memorializing a literary figure who has—as a consequence of our adulation—become, in effect, a literary demigod. The fact that Day’s narrative culminates in a parodic gesture by which he comically locates the metaphorics of the monument not in the literary but in the literal—in the plaster bust of Shakespeare—in no way lessens the significance of this drive. Indeed, there is nothing so Shakespearean in Day’s entire narrative as this gesture. For both the literary and the literal monuments in Shakespeare’s works are nearly always (even if sometimes unwittingly) parodic in nature. The most conspicuous instances of this are those burial monuments that cannot hold their occupants, a problem powerfully staged in the banquet scene when Macbeth sees and then addresses the ghost of Banquo: “Behold, look, lo, how say you? / Why, what care I? If thou canst nod, speak too. / If charnel-houses and our graves must send / Those that we bury back, our monuments / Shall be the maws of kites.”8 Another equally ominous (though significantly more elaborate) invocation of the incontinent tomb appears in Hamlet’s first encounter with the Ghost: “Let me not burst in ignorance but tell / Why thy canoniz’d bones, hersed in death, / Have burst their cerements; why the sepulcher, / Wherein we saw thee quietly inurn’d, / Hath op’d his ponderous and marble jaws / To cast thee up again.”9 Monuments in Shakespeare (perhaps like monuments to Shakespeare) so routinely, and therefore predictably, fail to realize their own ostensible objectives—permanence, memorialization, glorification, presence—that their failure to do so must itself be seen as a fundamental characteristic of the very idea of the monument. By these lights, and perhaps to our general surprise, the monument emerges as a self-defeating artifact. As the proximity of monument to memorializing may suggest, the monument is an expression of the work of memory. Or perhaps it is actually more apt to say that monuments arise out of our inchoate understanding of the failure of memory, its inability to realize the desire to provide

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something like presence in the face of the inevitability and inexorability of absence, whether that absence is the author lost to us by the passage of time or, more abstractly, the body lost to us through death. We construct the monument because we know we are going to forget.10 We find as profound an engagement with the problems of the ontology of absence (to use that phrase as a kind of shorthand) in the works of Shakespeare as we do any other dramatist or poet in the tradition, a feature of Shakespeare’s work that inspires us to replicate, in multiform ways, an analogous engagement. And it is this endless replication, repetition with a difference, across the centuries found in the work of generations of readers of the plays and poems who have labored to negotiate their relationship to both the absence of Shakespeare (witness the obsessions of so-called bardology that fetishize the artifact that would connect us to Shakespeare: the signature, the likeness, the manuscript originals) and, at the same time, to those activities—performative, theatrical, literary, critical, historical, and so on—that we undertake in Shakespeare’s name. We have, though, no guarantees that this vast and monumental work taken up in Shakespeare’s name, will succeed, that it will manage to bring us either nearer to Shakespeare or, failing that, provide a satisfactory recompense for his absence. But the practices we employ in these pursuits, as varied as they inevitably are, nevertheless remain grounded in one fundamental, if deeply problematical, assumption: that beneath or behind or otherwise prior to all of them, there is—in the model of a source or point of origin—a solid and substantive figure whose facticity, even if not wholly approachable, underwrites our efforts. And it is this figure of Shakespeare—or, even more hopefully, “Shakespeare himself”—that seems to hold out the possibility of a pure relationship characterized by immediacy and the total absence of screens of any sort that might interpose—or mediate—between Shakespeare himself and any one of us. What this notion of immediacy describes is, of course, a mere fantasy, romantic in nature and nostalgic in its sentiment, but no less powerful and pervasive for all that. The discourse of immediacy has also carefully and exhaustively inventoried and identified the forces of mediation that, whatever their ostensible motives, appear (so the argument goes) only to screen us from directly accessing Shakespeare. These forces of mediation have changed over time, no doubt, and have included the practices of the early modern printing house, overambitious players given to improvisation, overzealous or otherwise incompetent editors, appropriative “improvers” or adapters of the plays, to say nothing of the more recent liberties (if that

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is what they are) taken by filmmakers and graphic novelists, to name just a few of the usual suspects. In the case of Shakespeare’s plays, the forms that this inevitable mediation have taken are perhaps countless and include (among many others) the mediations represented by the translation of acted plays into print editions; editorial practices that determine the character of those print versions; the ever-changing mechanics of stage performance and convention (the means, that is, of theatrical production, especially as they change across time); the natural evolution of language during the four centuries that separate us from Shakespeare’s moment; the interventions offered by criticism and theory; and the actual histories of productions—in print, on the stage, in film—over the centuries. The dream of unmediated access to Shakespeare, however, is remarkably resilient and one of long-standing. As an early nineteenth-century case in point, we can consider a particularly heated polemic that readers of the April 1822 issue of the British Critic would have encountered in the following paragraph that opens a review of a new edition of two plays by Shakespeare offered under the title Hamlet and As You Like It. A Specimen of a New Edition of Shakespeare: In spite of the national veneration universally felt for our great bard, he has been subjected amongst us to a series of more cruel mutilations and operations than any other author who has hitherto served to instruct or amuse his posterity. Emendations, curtailments and corrections (all for his own good), have been multiplied to infinity, by the zeal and care of those who have been suffered to take him in hand. They have purged and castrated him, and tattooed and beplaistered him, and cauterised and phlebotomised him with all the studied refinement, that the utmost skill of critical barbarity could suggest. Here ran Johnson’s dagger through, ‘see what a rent envious Pope has made,’ and ‘here the well-beloved Bowdler stabbed:’ while, after every blow, they pause for a time, and with tiresome diligence unfold the cause why they that did love him while they struck him, have thus proceeded.11

This reviewer objects to the kinds of editorial, critical, and adaptive work that have long been undertaken in Shakespeare’s name and characterizes such work as violent physical assault: Shakespeare’s works are imagined as a body that has been subjected to all manner of degradations—purgings, castration, and tattooing among them. Shakespeare’s corpus is the new Julius Caesar and generations of his editors are the coconspirators who, like Brutus, kill the thing they profess to have loved and then tell the causes

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of their proceeding. But what, the reviewer asks, has the true reader of Shakespeare done to deserve this treatment? “What has he, for instance, to do with the mode in which they have conducted the contest, with respect either to the favourite theories of the commentators, or the genuineness of the portraits of their author? Why is he to be pestered with the eternal bowings and scrapings of one brother book-worm to another? What has this or that person’s natural acumen, learned acquirements, or critical sagacity to do with him, or even with our author?” And the British Critic reviewer offers a brief vision, cast in the model of a plea, of the pure access to Shakespeare that the reader deserves: Let us have him placed before our eyes such as he really was—let us have him unadulterated with other men’s thoughts, unmixed with their ideas of composition—let us, in short, have given to us, for it will be a novelty—Shakespeare himself. (373)

The notion that what we need (and moreover what it is perfectly reasonable to expect) is direct and unmediated access to Shakespeare lies at the heart of this reviewer’s lamentations. But regardless of how one might feel about the “critical barbarity” brought to bear in various ways on the plays in the centuries since their earliest performances and subsequent publication, and in spite of the long-standing nature of this perhaps natural enough desire for immediate access to Shakespeare himself, it is today a nearly universally accepted fact within Shakespeare studies that not only is immediacy impossible due to the very nature of textual production and transmission, but also that no access is ever wholly unmediated. This understanding of our always mediated relationship to Shakespeare’s plays is by now a familiar story in the current critical literature. But what is less familiar—and in some cases at least what is virtually lost to us today—are many of the stories of the particular forms that the dream of an unmediated relationship to Shakespeare has taken historically. And contrary to the assertions of the British Critic reviewer quoted above, these dreams of immediacy are frequently offered by the critics whose works are rejected in the review as mutilations and disfigurements. They are also offered by other artists—painters, to name one important group, as well as by other dramatists and literary writers of various description. The desire for immediacy is a phenomenon that began during Shakespeare’s lifetime and that continues to this day. The history of this pursuit of immediacy constitutes the long story of the many mediatory endeavors offered in the name

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of Shakespeare—a category that is certainly vast, expansive, and perhaps illimitable. The aim of this book is to examine a particular and related set of these most interesting practices in which we have engaged over the past centuries in the apparently endless attempt to mediate our relationship to Shakespeare. We see in the British Critic review a number of the hallmarks of this desire for immediacy and the varied practices of mediation that such a desire has produced. The dream of immediacy has produced the idea that Shakespeare enjoys (if that is the correct word) a veneration—and one that is, moreover, national in nature. The now 400-year history of “emendations, curtailments, and corrections” brought to us by the labors of generations of textual editors bears witness to this dream. And we see the dream of immediacy as well in those defenders of “Shakespeare himself” (a group that includes as perhaps founding members those colleagues in the early modern theater who produced and celebrated the First Folio in 1623) whose nearly “idolatrous” reverence of his works has served to establish Shakespeare’s irreplaceability; his definitional uniqueness; and his transcendent literary, aesthetic, and cultural value. However, for the reviewer of the British Critic, as one example, there are no functional differences or distinctions between people we consider serious textual editors—Samuel Johnson, for instance—on the one hand, and on the other, editors who now would not be considered proper textual editors, Henrietta and Thomas Bowdler chief among them, because they are seen to have defiled the nearly sacred word of Shakespeare. Our reviewer in fact holds so fast to the dream of absolute and unmediated access to “our great bard” that any textual intervention is categorically inadmissible and unacceptable. Shakespeare is not, so the reviewer writes, “a proper subject for the sort of process he has undergone.” In fact, the review continues, Shakespeare is of all poets with whom we are acquainted, precisely the one, of whom we can least afford to lose one original iota: he is more singularly distinct from other writers than any of his tribe, and we cannot help feeling, even where a single word, a very syllable, of his inditing is varied or withheld, as if we missed something that no other being, past or present, could have given or supplied. (373)

No amount of editorial cleverness or ingenuity can justify or make amends for the harms done to Shakespeare. From such a perspective the only hope is to return to Shakespeare himself—an act for which editorial training, with all of its linguistic and philological sophistication, is not only

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insufficient, but precisely the wrong preparation and the wrong motivation for approaching Shakespeare’s works. The ideal (and only) appropriate textual relationship to Shakespeare is that of the properly “just and reasonable” commentator who “should be in some sort in love with his author” (British Critic, 379). But in point of fact, in the history of printed Shakespeare—and perhaps even more obviously within the histories of both performed and filmed Shakespeare—we have always “varied or withheld” some syllables or words or speeches or scenes, to say nothing of entire characters and, even, certain features (including prominent ones) of plot and story. And we have done this varying and withholding in the deliberate attempt to bridge whatever gaps we might think exist between Shakespeare and ourselves. Or rather, to eliminate gaps we will not always quite admit are present and need our intervention. The desire for immediacy is visible too in the “zeal” with which revisers and adapters have approached Shakespeare’s works, with an eye to improvement, after a certain fashion, even though it is certainly the case that one mediator’s improvement may be another’s “purging” or “castration.” And we see it as well in the explanations and justifications and legitimations—sometimes perhaps offered “with tiresome diligence”—of all we have done in Shakespeare’s name. This tradition is also at play in the history of what it has meant to yearn for access to “Shakespeare himself,” a desire that may have begun as the wish for access to the original or authentic texts (a vexed desire, to say the least) but that has taken other forms across time, including the near obsession with the desire to have an authentic portrait of Shakespeare. In both of these manifestations of the will to access “Shakespeare himself” we can see the complicated negotiations over the claims to authenticity. And in both the demand for authentic texts and the parallel demand for the authentic likeness, as in other attempts to mediate Shakespeare, we can detect the critical struggle: We look for the original—or, more abstractly, for originality—but the mediational practices undertaken in Shakespeare’s name actually serve to disrupt the possibility of the original altogether. Instead they conjure and make present those fears that attend the drive toward the original and raise in its definitional absence a vast array of specters: the monument, the counterfeit, the adaptation, and what I will call the remediation. The story of these fears and these specters produced in Shakespeare’s name—particularly in the nineteenth century—will be the focus of this study.

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The Monument, the Counterfeit, and the Adaptation If, as I think is the case, the specter of the counterfeit haunts Day’s staging of Double Falsehood, then Lewis Theobald’s adaptation of the putative Shakespearean original that lies behind it can be said to haunt the present study—even as it perhaps haunts the Shakespeare corpus more generally. In his recent book, Cardenio between Cervantes and Shakespeare: The Story of a Lost Play, Roger Chartier analyzes what he calls “Cardenio fever”—the apparently unslakable thirst over the last nearly 400 years to recover—in striking and various ways—a lost Shakespeare (or more likely, a Shakespeare and Fletcher) play that was itself evidently an adaptation of a sustained episode from Cervantes’s Don Quixote. While Chapter 2 (below) will take up in detail the story of one particular attempt to recover the lost Cardenio—Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood—I would here like to consider Chartier’s well-earned claim that this fever “reflects one of the essential tensions that permeate the written culture of modern Europe.”12 For Chartier, the history of the many afterlives of Cardenio “testifies to the extreme mobility and instability of texts, which are constantly revised, adapted and rewritten. In the case of Cardenio, the absence of any ‘Urtext’ does away with the constraints that ordinarily limit textual variations and material incarnations of the ‘same’ work” (Chartier, 180). But if we take seriously the notion that all textual iterations of Shakespeare’s plays are by their very nature second-order texts—that is, texts that by virtue of their status as copies of wholly lost originals cannot sustain claims to absolute authority—then all “textual variations and material incarnations” of Shakespeare’s works that have been composed for the last four centuries are, strictly speaking, released from any of the textual and material “constraints” from which Chartier believes only Cardenio uniquely to be free. In other words, the explanation that Chartier offers (correctly, I believe) for the power of the Cardenio story—that the story of the lost play and the many attempts at its recovery “is fascinating in the same way as are all stories of works whose loss leave an intolerable gap” (Chartier, 180)—actually holds true for Shakespeare’s works in general. And the gap Chartier perceives as always present between our possession of an actual work and the enduring absence of a lost one that is always generative of our various recovery efforts in fact serves to define our relationship to all of Shakespeare’s plays. Our efforts from the seventeenth to the present century at bridging—or, more aptly, at filling—that gap is the story that this book aims to explore.

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As suggested above, all interactions with Shakespeare are inevitably mediated. Indeed, as theoretical work in the field of literary, cultural, and visual studies over the recent decades has helped to reveal, the idea of bridging these gaps is always nothing more than the fantasy of presence motivated by a desire for an unfettered access to the real—the real text (“Shakespeare himself”), say, or the real world (“reality”) itself—and enabled by certain fictions we have created to support this dream. The question becomes, then, not whether our access is mediated, but rather, what might be the nature of any given mediation. To turn to the consideration of monuments, counterfeits, and adaptations of Shakespeare is to enter an entire critical conversation that is among the most vibrant and interesting areas of study with the field of early modern studies in general, and Shakespeare studies in particular. This work is expansive and sophisticated and covers a vast array of cultural and creative activities, including drama, poetry, novels, radio programs, films, graphic novels, computer games, to name a few of the most prominent forms adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare take today. This work is born from any number of critical and theoretical perspectives—adaptation studies and influence studies, for instance, as well as poststructuralist theory, Deleuzian rhizomatic speculation, gender studies, and postcolonial theory. We could easily expand this list of theoretical and methodological commitments and perspectives to include translation studies, as well as the study of appropriation and the ethical dimension involved in its many and varied practices.13 Among these—and, indeed, informing many of these, as well as the present study—is the ground-breaking work on adaptation found in Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation, a landmark book in which Hutcheon seeks to recover adaptation from the general contempt in which it is typically held—and as the above review seems to manifest: “[I]n both academic criticism and journalistic reviewing,” Hutcheon writes, “contemporary popular adaptations are most often put down as secondary, derivative.”14 She then cites the stronger and “more decidedly moralistic words used to attack film adaptations of literature” (one among several types of adaptation addressed in the book) cataloged by other scholars: tampering, interference, violation, betrayal, deformation, perversion, infidelity, desecration.15 Given the frequently vitriolic tenor of such evaluations, Hutcheon asks the difficult but wholly pertinent question: “If adaptations are, by this definition, such inferior and secondary creations, why then are they so omnipresent in our culture and, indeed, increasing steadily in numbers?” (Hutcheon, 4).16 The response to this question

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depends upon a series of redefinitions, all of which themselves depend on the prior rejection of what Hutcheon calls the “morally loaded discourse of fidelity” underwritten by the “implied assumption that adapters aim simply to reproduce the adapted text.” The rejection of fidelity criticism and the notion of adaptation as reproduction provides for Hutcheon’s first redefinition: “Adaptation is repetition, but repetition without replication” (Hutcheon, 7). Once freed from the constraints and limitations of the ideology of fidelity (if I can be granted such a phrase), we are able to encounter the adaptation on its own terms. Hutcheon identifies three defining features of the nature of adaptation as adaptation: it is an “acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works”; it is both a “creative and an interpretive act of appropriation/salvaging”; and it is an “extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work.” Hutcheon summarizes: “Therefore, an adaptation is a derivation that is not derivative—a work that is second without being secondary. It is its own palimpsestic thing” (Hutcheon, 8–9). Hutcheon’s redefinitions continue and include (among others) the argument that the adapted text “is not something to be reproduced, but rather something to be interpreted and recreated” (Hutcheon, 84), and, that the adaptation, shot through with its “palimpsestic doubleness” (Hutcheon, 120), emerges as an autonomous creative work that functions equally well—though of course differently—for both the “knowing” and the “unknowing” audience. For Hutcheon, the knowing audience is that set of readers (or auditors or listeners) whose presence (and perhaps participation) is required in order that an adaptation be understood as adaptation: To experience [an adaptation] as an adaptation … we need to recognize it as such and to know its adapted text, thus allowing the latter to oscillate in our memories with what we are experiencing. In the process we inevitably fill in any gaps in the adaptation with information from the adapted text. Indeed, adapters rely on this ability to fill in the gaps when moving from the discursive expansion of telling to the performative time and space limitations of showing. (Hutcheon, 120–21)

These adaptations—versions of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example—can be said to exist “laterally, not vertically: adaptations are derived from, ripped off from, but are not derivative or secondrate” (Hutcheon, 169).

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If, then, adaptations are not derivative, as Hutcheon asserts, and if they thereby escape the derision generally (but erroneously) applied to them under the sign of what we may want to consider the tyranny of fidelity, they do so through a complicated mechanism that Hutcheon, borrowing from Richard Dawkins’s notion of “cultural transmission” (“Cultural transmission,” Dawkins writes, “is analogous to genetic transmission in that, although basically conservative, it can give rise to a form of evolution”), identifies as “cultural adaptation.” Hutcheon writes, To think of narrative adaptation in terms of a story’s fit and its process of mutation or adjustment, through adaptation, to a particular cultural environment is … suggestive. Stories also evolve by adaptation and are not immutable over time. Sometimes, like biological adaptation, cultural adaptation involves migration to favorable conditions: stories travel to different cultures and different media. In short, stories adapt just as they are adapted. (Hutcheon, 31)17

In order more fully to explain (or to theorize) the specific mechanism that accounts for cultural adaptation, Hutcheon introduces the notion of an “adaptive faculty,” an idea, Hutcheon announces, that occurs (analogically) in relation to, and to an extent modeled on, Michael Taussig’s notion of the “mimetic faculty.” And Taussig’s idea (for its part) is modeled on and inspired by (indeed, we can say that it is itself a kind of “adaptation” of) Walter Benjamin’s essay “On the Mimetic Faculty.” Discussing the familiarity and difference that constitutes the adaptation as adaptation, Hutcheon writes: On an experiential level as well, the conservative comfort of familiarity is countered by the unpredictable pleasure in difference—for both creator and audience. Building upon Walter Benjamin’s 1933 essay, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” Michael Taussig has argued that the human compulsion to behave like something or someone else marks a paradoxical capacity to be Other. His anthropological study of the power of replication is focused on how a society can maintain sameness through alterity. He defines the mimetic faculty as ‘the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, yield into and become Other.’ What we might, by analogy, call the adaptive faculty is the ability to repeat without copying, to embed difference in similarity, to be at once both self and Other. (Hutcheon, 173)18

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The model of adaptation via the adaptive faculty that Hutcheon outlines is a powerful one and provides a useful way to think about adaptation as adaptation, without the prejudice that fidelity or proximity tend to bring to the discussion. At the same time, Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation allows a clearer understanding of adaptation—both as process and as product—as a “derivation that is not derivative—a work that is second without being secondary.” And the specific examples Hutcheon examines in detail, drawn from cinema, opera, music, and interactive video games (to name a few), go a long way indeed toward the recuperation of the adaptation as an autonomous work of art. This new status in turn serves as a telling instance of the dynamics of cultural adaptation and the endless story of storytelling as always story retelling: “In the workings of the human imagination,” Hutcheon concludes, “adaptation is the norm, not the exception” (Hutcheon, 177). While I find this argument persuasive across the wide range of adaptation practices Hutcheon surveys—novels to film, film to television, poetry to dance, narrative to opera, etc.—and across the wide range of historical, geographical, cultural, national settings, I would like here to note that Hutcheon’s study doesn’t address another kind of cultural adaptation: the multiple forms that remediations of Shakespeare’s plays for young readers may take, including novelizations, stage productions, and picture books. I do not mean this observation as a criticism; no book should be held accountable for every phenomenon that might be imagined falling under its purview. I do, however, mean to point to a more general lacuna in the criticism of adaptation when the adapted work or text is transmitted as an adaptation for young readers. Among the concerns informing this discussion is the question of whether the absence of adaptations of Shakespeare for young readers in Hutcheon’s book (though there are brief discussions of adaptations of Shakespeare from one form or genre to another: from play to film or from play to music) is only an indication of a lack of concern for this particular species of adaptation, or if it isn’t rather an indication of the need for a different theory of cultural adaptation altogether when the culture intended to receive the adaptation is that of the young reader. In other words, is the adaptation (in this case, of Shakespeare) for young readers so particular an undertaking that it requires a theory of its own? Reading what might be considered the prehistory of Shakespeare for children that is on offer in the nineteenth-century works studied here leads me to believe that it does.19

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Remediation For me, this need is what gives rise to my analysis of remediation s of Shakespeare—and I offer that term in part to distinguish between Thomas and Harriett Bowdler’s redactions and Shakespeare’s plays, between Nahum Tate’s adaptation of Shakespeare for his version of King Lear and Charles Lamb’s prose narrative version of that play, or between Mary Cowden Clarke’s imagined girlhoods of Shakespeare’s heroines and the plays from which (in some fashion) they derive. In my view, these nineteenth-century projects cannot be properly considered adaptations in the strict sense of that term. But what then are they? My response is that they are remediations. I borrow the term remediation from the field of media studies because it offers a powerful heuristic that can provide a new perspective on precisely those engagements and entanglements with Shakespeare that characterize Lamb and Clarke (and many other writers besides) that, while bearing certain similarities to adaptations are nevertheless sufficiently distinct from them—especially on the level of form—to require a separate critical or interpretive language of their own when we seek to understand them on their own unique terms. In their landmark book Remediation: Understanding New Media, David Bolter and Richard Grusin identify key terms and concepts that apply to the present discussion.20 First, in response to the question “What is a Medium?” they respond with a “simple definition” that identifies a medium as “that which remediates. It is that which appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real” (Bolter and Grusin, 65). And they define “remediation” thus: “Defined by Paul Levinson as the ‘anthropotropic’ process by which new media technologies improve upon or remedy prior technologies. We define the term differently, using it to mean the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms” (Bolter and Grusin, 273). For Levinson, emergent media can be said to remedy certain shortcomings or liabilities in prior ones, so (as an apt example) the spoken and heard human voice enabled by the telephone together replace the dots and dashes of the telegraph.21 But for Bolter and Grusin, on the other hand, newer media are by their very nature always entangled with prior media not only to remedy liabilities, but indeed to appropriate the forms and the logics of those prior media in the intentional attempt to incorporate, to absorb, and thereby to transcend them.

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Bolter and Grusin are especially concerned with contemporary media, and digital media in particular, in which they detect and trace the “twin logics” of immediacy (the drive toward the reality effect that denies the presence of the medium itself) and hypermediacy (a form of representation that multiplies acts of mediation and thereby celebrates the medium). For the former, they point to realist cinema in which the medium itself is meant to disappear and “leave us in the presence of the thing represented” (Bolter and Grusin, 6); and for the latter, they offer the heavily mediated website, with text and image and sound and video. Although Bolter and Grusin are dedicated to the study of contemporary digital media, the power of their analyses is based, in part, upon their understanding of the remedial nature of all media over the past several centuries, a history that they suggest originates with the renaissance invention of linear perspective. For it is linear perspective—with its mathematization of space and the illusion of the reality of objects in a deep visual field—that stands as the founding effort to achieve media transparency. What I propose here is to extend the Bolter and Grusin theorization of remediation beyond the domain of visual representation (which is their primary focus) to the more general field of formal remediation. Even as the photograph remediates the logic of the perspectival painting, so certain discursive forms remediate prior ones, for similar goals and with similar effects and consequences (even as Bolter and Grusin’s new definition of “remediation” remediates Levinson’s prior one). Examples of formal remediation within the context of the nineteenthcentury writers addressed here would include the work necessary to present some version of a Shakespeare play as an expurgated script for a family recitation (as do the Bowdlers), or as a prose narrative “retelling” (as do Mary and Charles Lamb) or as a story or novella (as does Mary Cowden Clarke). Each of these bears a passing resemblance to adaptation (or appropriation), but are fundamentally different—not only in form or media, but in design, intention, ideological commitments, and intended audiences. Expanding our critical apparatus beyond the adaptation to include the remediation offers a more powerful and sensitive point of entry for understanding these works for the particular and perhaps strange productions that they are. By focusing on a selected set of remediations, ranging from some of the very earliest adaptations of his plays for the Restoration stage to nineteenthcentury prose engagements (of various kinds) with Shakespeare’s plays, this book addresses remediation itself as one particularly important species of mediation. And among the many defining characteristics of remediations

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that serve to separate them from other forms of mediation (the introduction of error through the complicated process of producing texts of the plays, for example), the most significant is the nature of remediation as the deliberate attempt to renegotiate our relationship to Shakespeare’s works. That is, remediations represent the active and essentially collaborative intervention that aims to reengage, re-situate, reinvent Shakespeare at any given moment. At the same time, remediation is informed not only by the desire to translate Shakespeare’s works across media—from stage play to printed play, from printed play to short story, novel, picture book, and so forth—but also by the goal of restoring or returning the chosen object (King Lear, for instance, or Othello, to name two Shakespeare plays addressed in this study) to a state of health or, even, perfection from which it is seen or imagined somehow to have slipped. In this sense, the remediation not only articulates exactly how a given artist—dramatist, novelist, painter, photographer, etc.—wishes to reimagine Shakespeare, but also realizes a scenario in and through which a certain kind of damage done to Shakespeare can be ameliorated. And in those texts and images that are aimed especially at young readers—retellings of the plays by Charles and Mary Lamb, and reimaginings offered by Mary Cowden Clarke—Shakespeare remediations can also be understood as remedial in nature. In these works the remediation is cast instrumentally as that text or image or adaptation that both emanates from and will ultimately lead the young (apprentice) reader to the “original” play, in a word, to “Shakespeare himself.” The discussion that follows is necessarily a partial one and while I cannot hope to write anything so comprehensive as a history of Shakespeare remediations (if for no other reason than the simple fact that all of our interactions with Shakespeare have been, in one way or another, remediatory), I do propose to offer a carefully selected set of texts and images as “specimens” (to borrow a key term in the story of Shakespeare from the eighteenth century forward) that illustrate not only important moments in the long history of Shakespeare remediations, but that also open for us discussions of key issues at stake in that history. Chapter 2—“Monumental Shakespeare”—begins this work by offering a detailed discussion of Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood (1727), the play he claimed was his own adaptation of the lost Cardenio. Critics have noted recently that Cardenio is a lost early modern text based upon an episode from Cervantes’ Don Quixote that has been “rediscovered” time and again in new remediations ever since the seventeenth century. The history of these “resurrections” (as Roger Chartier has argued) is linked

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to both the canonization of authors such as Cervantes and Shakespeare, on the one hand, and on the other, the attendant process by which their works become “monuments” (Chartier, 180–81). In this chapter, I take up the question of Cardenio and our abiding interest in its history of appearance and disappearance that has, in effect, all the features of the haunting Chartier offers as a metaphor in his book. My concern, though, is not in haunting as a trope, but rather as an integral feature of the processes of creating the (literary) monument we now recognize (or agree to accept) Shakespeare’s Works to be. At the same time, I am interested in the connection between such hauntings as are on display in the history of Cardenio and, more particularly, in Theobald’s Double Falsehood and the drive toward monumentalization that stands as one of the primary versions that remediations of Shakespeare have long taken. Chapter 3—“Redaction”—considers the phenomenon of censoring the plays of Shakespeare that takes place once the creation of a more or less stable canon of his works is well under way—once, that is, the work of an editorial monumentalization of Shakespeare had taken shape and was moving toward consensus and consolidation. This was a monumental work by a number of key Shakespeare editors who had succeeded in constructing a canon of generally accepted texts that constituted a founding corpus of English literary greatness—even if, as the British Critic reviewer whose article was discussed above wrote, the actual work of this construction was at times something of a bloody affair: “They have purged and castrated him, and tattooed and beplaistered him, and cauterized and phlebotomised him with all the studied refinement, that the utmost skill of critical barbarity could suggest.” For this reviewer, the Shakespeare texts bear the scars of “Johnson’s dagger,” the “rent envious Pope has made,” and the wounds where “the well-beloved Bowdler stabbed” (British Critic, 372). This work of the Shakespeare editors in constructing the Shakespeare corpus, wounds and all, could be characterized as the effort to assemble a body of texts into a complete whole, even though this great labor at times included acts of rejection, excision, and removal of apocryphal plays and poems. No sooner, though, is this corpus assembled that efforts begin to disassemble it, to eliminate and reduce and redact. The story of this countermovement in the history of Shakespeare remediations is the topic of this chapter. In particular, I turn to one of the British Critic reviewer’s many targets: the edition of Shakespeare produced by “the well-beloved Bowdler,” the Family Shakespeare, the first expurgated edition of Shakespeare’s plays and perhaps the most popular and enduring editions of Shakespeare through the nineteenth

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and into the early years of the twentieth century. As I will argue, this project by the brother and sister Henrietta and Thomas Bowdler to produce a sanitized edition of Shakespeare’s plays suitable for family reading served to establish the first of two enduring methodologies—at once editorial and ideological in nature—that characterize remediations of Shakespeare from the nineteenth century forward. The second of these enduring traditions of nineteenth-century remediation—deletion—is the subject of Chapter 4: “Retelling.” Here I consider the landmark remediations by Charles and Mary Lamb, Tales from Shakespeare, the first prose retellings of Shakespeare’s plays in the language (and a work that has been in continuous print since its first appearance in 1807). The discussion begins with a reading of Charles Lamb’s account of his encounter with another kind of monument: the David Garrick Memorial in Westminster Abbey and the commendatory verses engraved upon it. “To paint fair nature” was written by the novelist and poet Samuel Jackson Pratt and while the poem features a set of standard tropes—the identification of Shakespeare as Nature’s poet, for example—it also introduces the new idea. Pratt suggests that Shakespeare’s works had fallen into an oblivion so absolute that it was only through the efforts of Garrick as actor that they have been revived at all: it is the “Actor’s genius” that causes Shakespeare’s work to “breathe anew.” What is immortal, then, is not Shakespeare works, but rather Garrick himself who lends Shakespeare some of his reflected glory that guarantees the eternal fame of “Shakespeare.” Pratt’s celebration of Garrick stands in stark contrast to Lamb’s understanding of the nature of Shakespeare’s works, especially the tragedies, as well as his understanding of the nature of the theatrical experience more generally. Lamb’s well known anti-theatricalism functions as one pole for my discussion of his relationship to Shakespeare; the second is Lamb’s flirtation with the counterfeit in the form of Falstaff’s Letters that he produced in collaboration with his longtime friend James (Jem) White in 1796. As I will argue, Lamb’s important work as Shakespeare remediator, written in collaboration with his sister, can be understood as emerging precisely from the uneasy point of contact between his anti-theatricalism, on the one hand, and his interest and skill in literary counterfeiting, on the other. Chapter 5—“Lamb’s Lear”—continues my consideration of the work of Charles Lamb as remediator and takes up his version of King Lear. Although it is certainly the case for all of the Lambs’ retellings of plays by Shakespeare, it is especially true that Charles Lamb’s “King Lear” epitomizes a great many of the problems remediators of these plays confront,

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as well as many of the solutions to these problems that they are able to offer. One of the reasons why Lear is such an apt specimen for this discussion of remediation is that Shakespeare’s play provides a case study in the aesthetics of remediation. As I will argue, the story of Shakespeare’s King Lear is precisely the story of remediation. This begins for us with Shakespeare as a remediator of his several primary sources—Geoffrey of Monmouth, Raphael Holinshed, John Higgins, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, the anonymous play The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir and his Three Daughters , and Samuel Harsnett—but does not stop there. It also includes Shakespeare as self-adapter (his revision of the Q1 Lear into the F1 Lear), and extends well beyond Shakespeare’s own lifetime—from Tate’s Restoration version and its many heirs through to the middle years of the nineteenth century (including Garrick, Kemble, Kean, Macready). And it is a process, I argue, that culminates (but by no means concludes) with the work of the so-called “new revisionists” in the 1980s and 1990s whose work not only “restored” to us the multiple Shakespeare Lear plays, but also helped to usher in a wholly new figure for contemporary readers: Shakespeare as reviser of his own work. It is the double burden of this chapter both to locate Charles Lamb’s revolutionary work in his remediation of King Lear and to rethink—indeed, to reestablish—the centrality of remediation to Shakespeare, to the study of Shakespeare, and (thinking of the British Critic reviewer’s argument about what qualifies a person to comment on the playwright at all) to the love of Shakespeare. In the book’s sixth chapter —“Design and the Fate of Character”—I look to the strategy of dilation (even as the preceding chapters addressed redaction and deletion) and seek to interrogate the ways in which remediators contend with two matters of prime importance: character, which will become the core concern of dilatory narrative remediations, and the constraints placed upon such dilations by Shakespeare’ presiding design. One of the essential questions addressed in this chapter is whether or not—and if so, to what extent—encounters with design can shed critical light on the processes of remediation, especially in instances in which the form that the remediation takes is a sustained dilation of the source text. The discussion of dilation and design as it impacts adaptations of Shakespeare (particularly for young readers) has its beginnings in the nineteenth century in Mary Cowden Clarke’s Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (1850–1852), which will be my specimen text in this chapter. But, as I will argue, the concern with character and design is also deeply embedded within a broader scientific, and subsequently social, context provided by the larger discussions

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and debates surrounding what in the biological sciences (which function here as the presiding paradigm for this debate) was the centrally important contest between morphology and teleology, the theoretical arguments, that is, concerning the nature of structure and the nature of purpose. These are terms, as I argue, that arise within mid- to late-nineteenth-century biological science—culminating in the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species —but that extend into other areas of culture, including Clarke’s remediations of Shakespeare’s plays. The idea that Shakespeare’s works remain central texts within Western literary tradition is of course no surprise. Nor is it a new endeavor to submit those works to the varied practices of remediation. Indeed, the history of our fascination with Shakespeare’s works is at the same time the history of our remediations of them—across genres and media and history. Our abiding care to remediate Shakespeare, as this book argues, is a constant across time. Even if what Shakespeare is or what Shakespeare means changes through the centuries—as is assuredly the case—the desire to negotiate our relationship to those works by remediating them remains. Attending to the story of our remediations of Shakespeare’s works from the seventeenth century to the present moment has a double virtue. First, it serves to remind us that part of the greatness of those works resides in their generative power, something that can be gauged in part by the countless remediations that they inspire and conjure and (in some measure) demand. And the second virtue of attending to the story of remediating Shakespeare is that doing so perhaps helps us to redefine his works. If the nineteenth-century remediations written by the Bowdlers, Lambs, and Cowden Clarke constitute a prehistory of our more contemporary remediations—particularly those remediations of Shakespeare that are intended for young readers—then it is well to point to some of the key milestones of that history. Let this stand, then, as an invitation for continued new work in the study of this vibrant engagement with the Shakespeare afterlife. And not only—or even, not primarily—for what it may tell us about Shakespeare. Indeed, because of the sheer richness and diversity of the plays, novels, stories, and other retellings sampled in this study (to say nothing of the films, music, dance, comic books, computer games, adaptations, translations, and more that are beyond the scope of this book), it is no longer adequate to consider Shakespeare’s works as cultural objects. Rather, they are more properly considered—and therefore treated—as cultural sites for remediation dedicated to the endless work of new aesthetic creation.

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Notes 1. W. C. Day, Behind the Footlights; Or, the Stage as I Knew It (London: Frederick Warne and Co., 1885), 62. 2. Lewis Theobald, The Double Falsehood; Or, the Distrest Lovers (London, 1728). The play was reprinted in a “second edition” (which Hammond, below, notes is “not truly a second edition” [Hammond, 135]), also in 1728; a third edition (1767); and again in 1920, edited by Walter Graham (Cleveland, 1920). In 2010 the status of Theobald’s play reached a new height—and perhaps legitimacy—with Brean Hammond’s edition published in the Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010); Hammond’s editorial material, particularly the volume’s extensive Introduction, is indispensable for contemporary readers of Double Falsehood and students of what Hammond calls the “Double Falsehood enigma” (1). For an argument in favor of “the right of DF to appear in editions of Shakespeare,” see Richard Proudfoot, “Can Double Falsehood Be Merely a Forgery by Lewis Theoblad?” in The Quest for Cardenio: Shakespeare, Fletcher, Cervantes and the Lost Play, eds. David Carnegie and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 162–79, 163. All quotations from this play that appear in this chapter are taken from the second edition, hereafter cited DF and cited parenthetically either by signature for editorial material, or by act, scene, and line number/s. There is a brief discussion of Day’s 1847 performance in G. Harold Metz, “Stage History of Cardenio-Double Falsehood,” Theatre History Studies 6 (1986): 90–91. 3. Day’s claim that the play had been lost to the stage for 120 years is an exaggeration; Metz lists performances in 1728, 1729, 1740, 1741, 1767, 1770, 1791, and 1793, all of which were staged in London, except the last, which was staged in Bath. See also Hammond, 105–21 and David Carnegie, “A Select Chronology of Cardenio,” in Carnegie and Taylor, eds., 283–85. Day’s contempt for the Letters Patent is transparent—and expansive. He writes, The box-office was opened a few days before the eventful Monday, and as an allurement to visit it, a notice was appended to the playbill to the effect that applicants for four dress circle tickets, or a private box (in plain language for the investment of a sovereign), would be favoured with a peep at the play-book with the Royal Patent attached. (Day, 63)

This “dodge” was sufficient, Day continues, “to ‘dot’ the first two rows of the boxes with curious or suspicious auditors.” One of these was a schoolmaster whose students had pooled their money to buy the tickets and who, having persuaded the “box book-keeper” to allow him a glance at the patent before payment, “had more than half convinced himself that the ‘get-up’

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was genuine, and hugged the delusion of the Royal coat of arms as an orthodox hall-mark” (Day, 63–64). 4. The Letter Patent reads, in part: Whereas our Trusty, and well-beloved Lewis Theobald, of our City of London, Gent. hath, by his Petition, humbly represented to Us, That He having, at considerable Expense, Purchased the Manuscript Copy of an Original Play of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, called Double Falsehood; Or the Distrest Lovers; and, with great Labour and Pains, Revised, and Adapted the same to the Stage; has humbly besought Us to grant him Our Royal Privilege, and Licence, for the Sole Printing and Publishing thereof, for the Term of Fourteen Years: We, being willing to give all due Encouragement to this his Undertaking, are graciously pleased to condescend to his Request. (DF, A1v)

Hammond discusses Theobald’s securing of this license as “an extra precaution against piracy,” as itself a part of Theobald’s efforts to protect Double Falsehood: “Although the 1710 Act of 8 Anne … was not initially interpreted to mean that authors retained rights to their own copy, Theobald was clearly taking advantage of the legislation to do just this” (Hammond, 15). 5. Interestingly, the concern here with the specter of the forgery and the fraudulent appears, in an altered form, in Day’s Introduction to his memoir, which he opens by citing the earnest—though wholly duplicitous—strategies deployed by the “tradesman … anxious to dispose of his goods,” who take steps to assure his customers of the excellence of his products: “He warrants everything.” And this “rule,” Day avers, “applies with equal force to the mercantile professional, be he lawyer, doctor, divine, or simple author or artist.” And among these steps meant to shift goods by warranting their excellence and purity, the most “enticing trap-bait” is the “innocent and ingenuous title Truth.” So even as the grocer, who silently cuts his coffee with chicory or the dairyman dilutes his milk, but both warrant their purity, so Day will follow suit: “Very well then, the author of these sketches only follows the lead of the counter, and of his brethren of the quill, when he honourably and faithfully assures the reader that the incidents in the following pages are free from adulteration and literally and absolutely TRUE” (Day, i–ii). 6. Day appropriated—or plagiarized—for this account of the source of the manuscripts the more elaborate (and more tantalizing) version recounted by Theobald himself in the preface to Double Falsehood. In an attempt to counter accusations of forgery, Theobald offers an account of the history of one of the three manuscripts he claimed to possess, one of the more provocative details of which introduces another form of illegitimacy: “There is a Tradition (which I have from the Noble Person, who supply’d me with

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7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

One of my Copies) that this Play was given by our Author, as a Present of Value, to a Natural Daughter of his, for whose Sake he wrote it, in the Time of his Retirement from the Stage” (Double Falsehood, A5). “[A]nother Ireland forgery” is in reference to William Henry Ireland (1777–1835) and his famous forgeries of works by Shakespeare, including the two plays Vortigern and Rowena (staged by John Philip Kemble in 1795) and Henry II, as well as poems, letters, and other documents. Although initially taken for true discoveries, these texts soon raised suspicions that grew more widespread until Edmond Malone, in An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments … Attributed to Shakespeare (London, 1795), exposed Ireland’s forgeries entirely. Ireland soon thereafter confessed, publishing first a pamphlet, An Authentic Account (London, 1796), and then a book, The Confessions of William-Henry Ireland Containing the Particulars of his Fabrication of the Shakespeare Manuscripts (London, 1805). For a discussion of this celebrated case of literary forgery, see S. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 193–223. For a discussion of Malone’s reactions to his encounter with Double Falsehood, see Ivan Lupi´c, “Malone’s Double Falsehood,” in Carnegie and Taylor, eds., 95–114. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, eds. Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2015), 3.4.68–70. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982), 1.4.46–51. The case may be even more complicated. Day, for his part, offers his narrative of the failed staging of The Double Falsehood in a memoir, a form wholly given to the domain of memory. As one immediate consequence of Day’s retelling of the failed theatrical—written some 40 years after that event itself—is that we have no way of knowing if Day’s recollections in 1885 actually correspond to his thinking in 1847. His memoir makes clear that he instantly sees Theobald as a liar (and as an opportunist and probably a forger), but whether or not that represents Day’s initial reaction to finding the playbook in the shop is unknowable. The British Critic April 1822, 372–80, 372. The edition of Hamlet and As You Like It was edited by Thomas Caldecott and was published in 1819. Caldecott opens his “Advertisement to the Reader” by articulating what he takes to be the standard protocol (and motivation) for all editors of Shakespeare’s works: It has been often and justly observed, that a great part of the employment of every succeeding editor of Shakespeare’s Works, has been to expose the unwarrantable license taken with the text by his predecessors, and to restore the readings of the old and true copies. (Caldecott, v)

1

12. 13.

14. 15.

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The complete edition of Shakespeare’s plays Caldecott promised (and of which Hamlet and As You Like It were intended as illustrations of his methods as editor) was never completed. As is noted in his DNB entry, Caldecott was in his moment a noted student of Shakespeare and his greatest achievement was his collection of quarto editions of the plays that was bequeathed to Oxford’s Bodleian library. Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing ([Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 191]) makes brief mention of Caldecott and in particular his attention to the priority of the First Folio in the project of editing Shakespeare. Roger Chartier, Cardenio Between Cervantes and Shakespeare: The Story of a Lost Play, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 179. The year 2014 saw the publication of an important collection of essays that suggests the rich range of current work on adaptation (to use that word here, at least provisionally): Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, eds. Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); for chapters of special significance in the present context, see especially Douglas Lanier, “Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value” (21–40) and Christy Desmet, “Recognizing Shakespeare, Rethinking Fidelity: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Appropriation” (41–57). In 2015 the journal Shakespeare published a special issue, “Adaptation and Early Modern Culture: Shakespeare and Beyond,” ed. Jennifer Clement; see especially Christy Desmet and Sujata Iyengar, “Adaptation, Appropriation, or What You Will,” (10–19). As suggested, the work in this area of critical inquiry is substantial and expanding; see also Jennifer Clement, “Beyond Shakespeare: Early Modern Adaptation Studies and Its Potential,” Literature Compass 10 (2013): 677–87; Margaret Jane Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2009); Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2006); Diana Henderson, Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); Shakespeare and Appropriation, eds. Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer (London and New York: Routledge, 1999); and Thomas Cartelli, Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). As its title suggests, the online peer-reviewed journal Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation (http:// www.borrowers.uga.edu/) is dedicated wholly to this field of study. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 2. Hutcheon cites Brian McFarlane, Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) and Robert Stam, “The Dialogics of Adaptation,” in Film Adaptation, ed. James Naremore (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000).

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16. Later in the book Hutcheon returns to the inventory of pejoratives—again quoting Stam’s “vivid terms”: Infidelity resonates with overtones of Victorian prudishness; betrayal evokes ethical perfidy; deformation implies aesthetic disgust; violation calls to mind sexual violence; vulgarization conjures up class degradation; and desecration intimates a kind of religious sacrilege toward the ‘sacred word.’ (qtd. in Hutcheon, 85)

Hutcheon’s next set of questions marks her deep concern (developed in the text in ways I cannot trace here) both to listen to what adapters actually say about their work and, at the same time, to reopen the seemingly closed debate about intentionality: “[W]hy would anyone willingly enter this moralistic fray and become an adapter? What motivates adapters, knowing that their efforts will be compared to competing imagined versions in people’s heads and inevitably be found wanting?” (Hutcheon, 86). 17. Later in her discussion Hutcheon returns to this issue: Dawkins’ postulating of the existence of those units of imitation or cultural transmission he calls ‘memes’ seems to me to be potentially very productive. Memes are not high-fidelity replicators: they change with time, for meme transmission is subject to constant mutation. Stories too propagate themselves when they catch on; adaptations—as both repetition and variation—are their forms of replication. Evolving by cultural selection, traveling stories adapt to local cultures, just as populations of organisms adapt to local environments. (Hutcheon, 176–77)

18. Hutcheon quotes from Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), xiii (qtd. in Hutcheon, 173). 19. In an earlier essay I offered a similar assessment: “Adapting Shakespeare for children is not only far more complex than is generally believed (by typical adult readers, at least), but it is at the same time an intensive labor that hides its own traces. As a consequence, the politics of adaptation have generally remained undertheorized.” See “Descending Shakespeare: Toward a Theory of Adaptation for Children,” in Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults, ed. Naomi J. Miller (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 181. In “Play’s the thing,” Naomi J. Miller offers a major contribution to the work of theorizing Shakespeare for children, with a special care to interrogate “the creative and critical implications of that evolution [of children’s Shakespeares] as evidence of changing conceptions of the intellectual autonomy and agency of the child in the eyes of adult authors, illustrators, educators and parents.” See “Play’s the Thing: Agency in Children’s Shakespeares,” in Shakespeare and Childhood, eds. Kate Chedgzoy,

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Susanne Greenhalgh, and Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 137–52. 20. David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999). 21. In his book The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). Levinson coins the term ‘anthropotropic’ to identify that tendency within the history of the evolution of media “to bring media ever more fully into human consonance” (60). “Media,” Levinson argues, “seem to evolve to modes that increasingly replicate natural patterns of human communication (while continuing to extend across space and time)…” (100).

CHAPTER 2

Monumental Shakespeare

The relationship between the monument and the counterfeit is a complicated one. Indeed, so intimate is the imbricated relationship between these two manifestations of the desire for unmediated access to Shakespeare that to speak of one necessarily gives voice to the other. Day’s plaster bust of Shakespeare as the author of Double Falsehood, for instance, can be said to embody not only all that comprises the drive to memorialize Shakespeare, but also at the same time—and in the same gesture—the politics of the counterfeit. The bust lays claim to the manufactured legacy of Shakespeare as literary demigod even as it embodies the fraudulent nature of Day’s opportunistic presentation, as well as what Day understood to be Theobald’s similarly fraudulent production of a counterfeit Shakespeare play. There are three related issues in particular that constitute remediation and in particular this principle of the monument—issues that are on clear display in Day’s account of his staging of “Shakespeare’s last play” and that will serve to organize the following discussion: The tension between authenticity and the counterfeit . The monument is always constructed out of a defining tension between the quest for authenticity and the specter of fraud. Day’s entire account is haunted (if somewhat ironically) by the specter of fraud manifested not only by what Day believes to be the fraudulent claims of a Shakespearean genealogy offered by Theobald, but also in Day’s own reproduction of this fraud © The Author(s) 2019 H. Marchitello, Remediating Shakespeare in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22837-8_2

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when he stages Double Falsehood as “Shakespeare’s last play,” even though he clearly believes that the play is nothing more than an elaborate forgery. This anxiety is in tension throughout with its mighty—and elusive—opposite: authenticity. This is figured in a number of ways, including Day’s scorn for the Letters Patent and its (royal) ratification of the alleged Shakespearean genealogy that Theobald claimed for his adaptation. It is also evident in Theobald’s claims to ownership—of the Shakespeare (and Fletcher) manuscripts and of his own reworking of them into the Double Falsehood. For Theobald, authenticity becomes a matter of authorship, a notion that was in Theobald’s time—and, indeed, even in Theobald’s own works—in the process of consolidation into its modern form. The contest between the presence and absence of bodies. Day’s account registers a deep concern with the physicality of bodies—whether that of Jim and his knowing and nodding head, or that of Fanny Hamilton who Day suggests is so excessively present on the stage as to rupture the necessary suspension of disbelief required for the performance to succeed. More particularly, Day’s story stages the conflict between the presence and the absence of bodies, with special importance on the status of the authorial body initially registered in the audience’s (mock indignant) call of “Author!” in the face of a manifestly poor play. Part of the fun of this call, of course, is a function of the fact that the author in question is dead. But even this fact becomes only further energy for the parody that emerges as the players’ offer of a bust of Shakespeare in lieu of the now permanently absent author himself.1 As a reply to the call of “Author” and as a negotiation of the contest between the absent body and the demand for its presence, the Shakespeare bust functions rather as a ghost. The “bust of the Immortal Bard” makes its appearance as the figure of the author as a monument—as that Shakespeare who (as Michael Dobson reminds us) had already been fashioned into the figure of the national poet long before Day’s staging of Double Falsehood.2 But the Bard, although still indeed in the theater, has been residing upon a rather out-of-the-way shelf in an unofficial dressing room, covered not only with the dust of years but perhaps with something like the patina of old-fashionedness, a sentiment that accords with certain other passages in Day’s account.3 For Day, the appearance of Shakespeare once again upon the stage serves both to provide a satisfactorily comic dénouement and to acknowledge Shakespeare’s status as theater—and national—icon: a monument both of and to theatrical and dramatic durability, if a little dusty, and transcendence, if a little tired. At the same time, Shakespeare’s bust carried on stage harkens back to

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earlier appearances (or, more aptly, apparitions) of Shakespeare as a ghost upon the late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century stage, a practice that came to be something of a commonplace in the years leading to and following after Theobald’s Double Falsehood.4 The bust works in this joke because it is a representation of the real (the authentic, the physical) Shakespeare, because in some measure it serves (if only metaphorically) to make the missing body of the author present. The role of memory. The construction of the monument is the elaborate and self-conscious staging of the work of memory. In Day’s account, his staging is something of a marvel since his discovery of the last (because lost) play of Shakespeare was, in fact, lost twice: first between the early seventeenth century and Theobald’s adaptation more than 100 years later and, second, by virtue of Day’s latter-day resurrection of the play in the middle of the nineteenth century. The mechanism that allows for both instances of the play’s discovery is memory: the plays are last because they are lost to memory, forgotten, and it takes first Theobald and then Day to redeem these plays—or these books—Prospero-like from the abysm of time.5 This, indeed, is the work of the monument: as both a call to memory and as the (in this case, textualized) means by which that which is lost is in some measure restored. Moreover, the critical role played by memory is further charged and freighted with meaning because Day’s account comes in the form of a memoir and this fact renders Day’s relationship to Double Falsehood still more complicated: he writes his recollections in 1885 of an event that took place in 1847 regarding a performance of a play written—or adapted—in 1728 that was based on a play from the early 1610s that was, in turn, based on a text published in 1605 by Cervantes. The effective collapsing of time that characterizes Day’s account (and now this discussion of it) is emblematic of the challenges endemic to the practices of remediation.6 Late in the Epilogue to his recent book Cardenio between Cervantes and Shakespeare, Roger Chartier offers an assessment of the ongoing obsession with this lost play that might well function as its epitaph: The Cardenio obsession is haunted by the ghost of Shakespeare, even if the play was written in collaboration with Fletcher, who indeed may have been its principal author, and even if Shakespeare’s text can only be read between the lines in Lewis Theobald’s rearrangement of it.7

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The long history of the Cardenio obsession that Chartier charts in his study is the record of this haunting: “Between the eighteenth century and the present day,” Chartier writes, “the desire to provide a text, a body, a materiality to this nagging ghost has inspired writers, theatre directors and publishers alike” (Chartier, 180). On this account, the lost play is described by way of a telling set of terms: the play is “forever absent” yet periodically “rescued from oblivion” in a series of one “resurrection” after another (Chartier, 180–81). Among these various “resurrections,” for Chartier the pivotal moment is the 1727 staging and publication of Lewis Theobald’s Double Faleshood precisely because by these events and the controversies they prompted “the play became the subject of a new kind of discourse, based on the individualization of the writing, the originality of the works and the canonization of the author.” And this canonization of the author—which becomes “decisive for defining literary property” (even if this process does not conclude for another century and the eventual emergence of modern copyright)—was the same process that for certain authors, especially Cervantes and Shakespeare, “turned their work to monuments” (Chartier, 181). In this chapter I would like to take up the question of Cardenio and our abiding interest in its history of appearance and disappearance that has, in effect, all the features of the haunting Chartier offers as a metaphor in his book. My concern, though, is not in haunting as a trope, but rather as an integral feature of the processes of creating the (literary) monument we now recognize (or agree to accept) Shakespeare’s Works to be. At the same time, I will be interested in the connection between such hauntings as are on display in the history of Cardenio and, more particularly, in Theobald’s Double Falsehood and the drive toward monumentalization that stands as one of the primary versions that remediations of Shakespeare have long taken. As the twinned histories of Theobald’s Double Faleshood and Day’s perhaps belated staging of it in the nineteenth century suggest, the path toward a reliably Shakespearean canon is charted through the construction of monuments, literal and metaphorical, and the ways in which these monuments are haunted by our endless attempts to resolve the crisis of absences that become visible, if at all, largely as ghosts.

I Day’s narrative represents a striking instance of the manifestation of a certain set of literary, editorial, and entrepreneurial practices that are focused

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precisely on Cardenio, this last of Shakespeare’s plays, and its periodic appearance and disappearance over the last nearly four hundred years. For although Theobald never offers a title for the Shakespearean original upon which he claimed to have based his Double Falsehood, this lost original—if indeed there was a lost original—is understood to have been Cardenio, a play thought to have been written by Shakespeare in collaboration with John Fletcher and performed on at least two separate occasions in the year 1613. Cardenio is a lost play that has not consistently remained lost, and as such—as lost and found and lost again—it is the most ephemeral of works attributed partly or wholly to Shakespeare because it is relentlessly transitory and, to the best of our knowledge, has always been so. It is the only “Shakespeare” play never to have been printed (and in this regard is unlike that other lost play, Love’s Labour’s Won, which seems to have been in print at some point prior to 1603).8 Cardenio’s appearances in the world are so fleeting and so spectral, in fact, that they are perhaps more appropriately understood as traces of a presence or object in the very process of enacting its own disappearance. Our earliest knowledge of the play’s existence comes to us by way of hearsay about a play variously called Cardenno or Cardenna performed in the spring and summer of 1613. It does not make its first appearance as Cardenio until some forty years later—and even then it does so once again not as a play, not as itself, but rather only as a trace: a 1653 Stationers’ Register entry on behalf of a publisher, Humphrey Moseley, who, though a publisher of Fletcher and Francis Beaumont, among others, never actually published plays by Shakespeare. To the extent, then, that Cardenio is the most ephemeral of the works attributed to Shakespeare it is also in some ways the most characteristic of them, too, not only because as a theatrical event (rather than as a text) it is always in the process of appearing to view as if for the first time, but also because this missing play figures or embodies the very notion of absence as a principle of being. In other words, Cardenio stands as a perfect monument to Shakespearean monumentalization (and to Shakespearean monumentality), and, like all such monuments, it haunts Shakespeare’s works in the manner of a ghost. For the construction of the monument—like any act of inscription—is intended to mark a conspicuous absence that simultaneously and by its very nature the monument seeks to deny. This monumental act of inscription—which, because of its proximity to writing and death, I will rather call the process of encryption—is akin to the dynamic Jonathan Goldberg discusses in his analysis of the inscription of character—and the critique of interiority—in Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. In

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his essay “Shakespearean Characters,” Goldberg offers an exemplary reading of Sonnet 122 (“Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain”) in relation to that poem’s complicated performance of the textual inscription of character (“The opacity of Sonnet 122 doubles the obscurity of the texts it treats, since the poem serves not merely to represent them but also to be the writing it describes”) and to Jacques Derrida’s reading of Sigmund Freud’s image of the “mystic writing pad,” a figure for the mind—consciousness above, the unconscious below—and a model for understanding the relationship between memory and forgetting.9 But as Goldberg points out, the “‘depth’ of the mind, in this image, is illusory; depth is also a surface marked by repeated incisions. The more the wax is marked, the less easily can the marks be retrieved or deciphered; that is, more memory, more forgetfulness. It is this simultaneity of erasure/obliteration and retention that the Shakespearean character scores” (Goldberg, 42). The monument similarly seeks to retain even as it obliterates. This is indeed the work of the monument, and, like ghosts in Shakespeare in general—and the ghost of Old Hamlet in particular (as will be discussed below)—the monument is a powerfully generative figure precisely because it embodies a conspicuous absence that delimits an equally conspicuous presence. And it is this generative power, moreover, that can be said to haunt the very idea, or possibility, of presence itself. Indeed, as I will argue, Cardenio encrypts within its very nature the foundational notion of the monument essential to Shakespeare’s works. This is true in both a local and a global sense. Locally, Cardenio enacts a principle of encryption by which it works to embed at its core an enabling monument that it works just as assiduously to obscure: that earlier apparition of the ghostly and monumental, Hamlet . As this relationship between these two plays suggests, and as the very idea of the ghost insists, encryption is also a principle of repetition.10 This repetition moves in two directions: a centripetal movement inward in the direction (as it were) toward the very structure of the play and a centrifugal movement outward in the direction of a repetition of encrypted texts from one play to another, from Hamlet to Cardenio, from Cardenio to Double Falsehood. It is this second motion—a haunting across time—that indicates the global effects of the principle of the monument. It is the history of the lost Cardenio that this chapter will argue enables the works of Shakespeare altogether: Shakespeare’s Works —as a figuration of modern authorship—emerge from within the history of Cardenio’s constant negotiation of the monument, and the afterlife of this negotiation across

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time. We are always in the process of finding and then remediating Cardenio, and when we do we are made to confront a set of related issues that together serve as the ground for the invention of Shakespeare, not only in the early decades of the eighteenth century and the emergence during that important moment of what I will call proprietary editorship but even in our own time, which witnesses still the endless process of the invention and reinvention—in a word, the remediation—of Shakespeare. Theobald’s Double Falsehood embodies precisely the monument principle sketched above, for I take Theobald’s play to be a revision of the lost Cardenio. In the introduction to their collection of essays on “late Shakespeare,” Jennifer Richards and Richard Knowles note the traditional critical assessment of Theobald’s Double Falsehood as nothing but a clever forgery, but they also discuss the “strong counter-tradition which has characterized the text as an authentic, if mangled, redaction of the lost Cardenio.”11 Citing a growing interest in Cardenio in recent years, together with the “gradual rehabilitation of Theobald’s reputation as a Shakespearean scholar,” Richards and Knowles suggest—in very apposite language—that “[i]t is the appearance of a text, however mutilated, attributed to Shakespeare at a point when his collaborations were unrecognized and the existence of Cardenio unknown, which makes the possibility that Double Falsehood embodies the ghost of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play so likely.”12 In addition to taking seriously Theobald’s claim that Double Falsehood is an adaptation of a then-extant Cardenio, I want also to take very seriously the figure of the ghost invoked in Richards and Knowles’s suggestion about the relation between Theobald’s play and the Shakespeare-Fletcher play that may—or, as I see it, that indeed does—haunt it. This is less melodramatic than perhaps may first appear. The term “ghost,” after all, names a profound absence—or an erasure—and not a true presence. It names, one could say, the frisson of that contest between the missing object—whether legitimacy, body, or memory—whose absence we feel as palpable and the fear of the gravitational pull of a forgetfulness that would dissolve all bodies, presences, and meaning altogether. These are the forces that serve to engender the urge toward the monumentalization of Shakespeare that famously characterizes the 1623 Folio.13 And it is this same negotiation of the monument, whose presiding figure is the ghost, that is also evident in our own critical and frequently hypothetical reconstructions of Shakespeare’s plays, first as texts and then as Works : as the invention of the Shakespearean canon itself suggests, when confronted with the ghost, we build its monuments.14

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II Unlike the manuscript and textual genealogy upon which it may or may not rest, the story of Theobald’s play is a well-documented (if occasionally forgotten) one. Theobald’s dedicatory letter identifies his Double Falsehood as “this Orphan Play” and celebrates Theobald’s own “good Fortune to have retrieve[d] this Remnant of [Shakespeare’s] Pen from Obscurity.”15 Theobald is explicit in his understanding of the decomposed nature of the Shakespearean original that is restored through his adaptation. He writes to his dedicatee George Dodington that it is his “greatest Ambition that this Piece should be received unto the Protection of such a Patron: And,” making the explicit connection to the figure of the authorial body important to finding Cardenio, Theobald continues, “I hope, Future Times, when they mean to pay Shakespeare the best Compliment, will remember to say, Mr. DODINGTON was that Friend to his Remains, which his own SOUTHAMPTON was to his living Merit ” (DF, A3v).16 While this dedicatory letter is like all dedicatory letters in its appeal (via flattery) to the patron for protection, Theobald’s letter is extraordinary in its appeal to the named patron for something quite different: authenticity. Theobald writes, It is from the fine Discernment of our Patrons, that we can generally best promise Ourselves the good Opinion of the Publick. You are not only, SIR, a distinguish’d Friend of the Muses, but most intimately allied to them: And from hence it is I flatter Myself, that if You shall think fit to pronounce this Piece genuine, it will silence the Censures of those Unbelievers, who think it impossible a Manuscript of Shakespeare could so long have lain dormant. (DF, A3v–A4)

Theobald’s appeal for Dodington’s imprimatur as a guarantor of his own text’s status as genuine is a particularly clear example of the phenomenon described by Stephen Orgel in his essay “The Authentic Shakespeare.” “Authenticity,” Orgel writes, is “a matter of authentication, something bestowed, not inherited.”17 And as the Double Falsehood preface suggests, Theobald understands there to be an enabling relationship between the bestowing of authenticity and (private) ownership, and it is along a projected trajectory of the proprietary that Theobald will seek to negotiate the contest between the authentic and the fraudulent or the counterfeit. In the “PREFACE OF THE EDITOR”—which, he confesses, the “Success, which this Play has met with from the Town in the Representation … has almost made … unnecessary”—Theobald feels obligated only to

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“wipe out a flying Objection or two [rather] than to labour at proving [the play] the Production of Shakespeare” (DF, A5). To this end Theobald offers a brief and frustratingly elliptical history of the authentically Shakespearean genealogy he claims for Double Falsehood that leads back to Shakespeare’s Cardenio. Theobald claims in the preface to have in his possession not one but three manuscript versions of Cardenio.18 Theobald provides absolutely no information on the provenance of two of these manuscripts (except that one of them he was “glad to purchase at a very good Rate”); but for one he does provide some small history: It has been alledg’d as incredible, that such a Curiosity should be stifled and lost to the World for above a Century. To this my Answer is short; that tho’ it never till now made its Appearance on the Stage, yet one of the Manuscript Copies, which I have, is of above Sixty Years Standing, in the Handwriting of Mr. Downes, the famous Old Prompter; and, as I am credibly inform’d, was early in the Possession of the celebrated Mr. Betterton, and by Him design’d to have been usher’d into the World. What Accident prevented This Purpose of his, I do not pretend to know: Or thro’ what hands it had successively pass’d before that Period of Time. (DF, A5)

Theobald’s paired references to Thomas Betterton and John Downes are intended to function genealogically since Theobald’s claims for a Shakespearean original depend upon a certain line of descent: he can establish the authenticity of Double Falsehood because it is based upon a document in his possession whose provenance itself carries the weight of evidence sufficient to link Theobald’s play back through Thomas Betterton and John Downes. But Theobald’s introduction of Downes (a one-time comedian with the King’s Men and from the 1660s a theater prompter and historian) serves to intimate a lineage that extends back further in time—back, in fact, to Shakespeare himself.19 This idea of argument by descent is something that is fundamentally important to Downes’s book Roscius Anglicanus (1708)—precisely in order to establish authenticity. In his description of Betterton’s Hamlet , for example, Downes sketches a genealogy of performances: The Tragedy of Hamlet ; Hamlet being Perform’d by Mr. Betterton, Sir William [Davenant] (having seen Mr. Taylor of the Black-Fryars Company Act it, who being Instructed by the Author Mr. Shakespeare) taught Mr. Betterton in every Particle of it; which by his exact Performance of it, gain’d him Esteem and Reputation, Superlative to all other Plays.20

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And Betterton’s performance as the king in William Davenant’s Henry VIII (to cite another instance) enjoys a similar direct line of descent from Shakespeare: “The part of the King was so right and justly done by Mr. Betterton, he being Instructed in it by Sir William, who had it from Old Mr. Lowen, that had his Instructions from Mr. Shakespear himself, that I dare and will aver, none can or will come near him in this Age, in the performance of that part.”21 The validity of Theobald’s claims for a Shakespearean original to his Double Falsehood—and that the original is the otherwise entirely lost Cardenio—has been much debated. Double Falsehood is based on an extended episode from part 1 of Don Quixote that narrates the (mis)adventures of Cardenio, the Ragged Knight. As mentioned above, we know that Shakespeare’s company on two occasions during the 1612–1613 Christmas season acted a play at court entitled Cardenno (or Cardenna)—and that in 1653 Moseley, who had by that point long since acquired many unpublished manuscripts having previously belonged to the King’s Men (the same Moseley, it should be added, who in 1647 had published the Beaumont and Fletcher folio), entered into the Stationers’ Register (on 9 September 1653) “The History of Cardenio by Mr. Fletcher & Shakespeare.”22 As critics since W.W. Greg have pointed out, this information would not have been known to Theobald, who—had he in fact known of Moseley’s entry (or of Moseley’s manuscript, for that matter)—would certainly have made good use of it in his defense against such vitriolic criticisms of his Shakespearean claim as were leveled against him by Alexander Pope, among a great many others.23 There is a second issue at stake here: Theobald was unaware of the collaborative authorship ascribed to the play in the Moseley entry.24 In fact, Theobald took great pains in his preface (and elsewhere) not only to defend the Cardenio connection but also to dismiss any suggestion that Fletcher’s hand is evident in the source manuscript (or manuscripts) he claimed to have had in his possession: Others again, to depreciate the Affair, as they thought, have been pleased to urge, that tho’ the Play may have some Resemblances of Shakespeare, yet the Colouring, Diction, and Characters, come nearer to the Style and Manner of FLETCHER. This, I think, is far from deserving any Answer; I submit it to the Determination of better Judgments; tho’ my Partiality for Shakespeare makes me wish, that Every Thing which is good, or pleasing, in that other great Poet, had been owing to his Pen. (DF, A5v)25

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As Stephan Kukowski has very powerfully argued, the detectable hand of Fletcher in Double Falsehood goes a long way to establishing the validity of Theobald’s claims to having owned a manuscript answering (in some more or less recognizable form) to the one he described: Although it is somewhat obscured by revision, the evidence we have is that the meter, the collocation of certain words, and the stylistic mannerisms of large parts of the play are distinctly Fletcherian. This does more than suggest Fletcher’s presence in the play: it makes clear that the play cannot be a forgery (unless, that is, Theobald had inadvertently forged the wrong writer); if the play is not a forgery, then the case for it being a relic of Cardenio is very strong. (Kukowski, 89)

This is certainly not the last word on this matter, for skeptics remain, as does what looks like indifference.26 A number of arguments against Theobald’s claims for a Shakespearean original cite (rather ironically) his other literary work as grounds for suspicion or doubt concerning Double Falsehood, especially his 1715 poem “The Cave of Poverty, a Poem,” written in direct imitation of Shakespeare’s narrative poems, as well as his 1720 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard II: The Tragedy of King Richard the II; As it is acted at the Theatre In Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields. Alter’d from Shakespeare, By Mr. Theobald.27

But in spite of these and other lingering questions and concerns, Kukowski’s argument has helped to turn the critical tide. Indeed, the publication of Chartier’s study of Cardenio fever is one compelling instance of the cultural dynamic he will call “the permanence of works and the plurality of texts” (Chartier, 183), the Carnegie and Taylor collection of essays, as well as Hammond’s Arden edition of the play—to say nothing of the numerous theatrical remediations of Cardenio (as Cardenio or as Double Falsehood) in recent years—all demonstrate a current and growing interest in reading Theobald’s play as a version of a seventeenth century (Shakespearean or, more often Shakespearean-Fletcherian) Cardenio.28

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Among the critical discussions I would like to consider one in particular, Richard Wilson’s essay, “Unseasonable Laughter: The Context of Cardenio,” in which Wilson simply reads Theobald’s play as Cardenio. Importantly, Wilson’s discussion of Cardenio constitutes something of a shift in critical attention from the question of legitimacy or authenticity versus the fraudulent to the two further issues identified above as integral to the principle of the monument: bodies and memory. Or rather, Wilson in effect resolves the legitimacy/fraud debate by locating it within the play’s negotiation of the status of bodies and memory—in other words, within a particular haunting. In his essay, Wilson locates Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Cardenio within two dominant and complexly-related political events at the end of 1612 and the beginning of 1613: the death of Prince Henry and the preparations for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine. Wilson cites David Bergeron’s insightful suggestion that in this fateful Christmas season the Jacobean royal family “resembled a paradigm of tragicomedy” and that the decision to continue preparations for the wedding even in the face of the prince’s death (funeral-baked meats, indeed) was underwritten by “the desire to transmute the tragedy of Henry’s death into a romantic comedy, to create a fiction to displace difficult reality.”29 Wilson sees Cardenio as that play “more than any other … listed in the season’s repertoire to have straddled the mixed emotions of festivities concluded almost literally over a prince’s dead body” (Wilson, 195).30 Cardenio/Double Falsehood incorporates this set of issues into its very structure. Double Falsehood enacts its negotiation of the monument through the device of an onstage “Herse” in which the play’s villain (Henriquez) will “feign a corpse,” and by his pretended funeral entourage “coming late by / Crave a Night’s Leave to rest the Herse i’th’Convent” in which Leonora (Henriquez’s intended victim) has hidden herself (DF, 4.2). As other readers of the play have noted, this funeral hearse is brought onto the stage after the event—the coffin trick scene goes literally unseen (taking place off-stage and falling after the end of act 4 and before the beginning of act 5)—and rather inexplicably remains on stage through the reconciliations at the play’s end. This fact is conclusive for Wilson: “In fact, there is no feature of Cardenio,” he writes, “that links the play more concretely to its occasion, for at Whitehall in 1612 the empty bier could only have reminded the audience of the opportunities that attended that other cenotaph in [Westminster] Abbey.”31 That which should enable the monumentalization of the absent—or authentic—body as a new site for cathexis is revealed to be fantasy. Cardenio—as thus recovered (or reimagined)—is

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itself built upon the structure of the monument: the body of the Prince is unendurably lost, and its monumentalization is hopelessly untenable. This reading of Cardenio serves to locate one of the two seventeenthcentury productions we know to have been staged within its very precise and politically freighted context. At the same time, it helps to make clear that empty caskets are never entirely empty. Like literary canons, memorials in marble or in verse, and other figures or tropes of the monument, empty caskets hold ghosts. For Theobald and readers of Double Falsehood (and perhaps for spectators of Cardenio in 1613, too), the ghost contained—or conveyed—by the empty casket is Hamlet . There are two principle ways in which Hamlet haunts Double Falsehood: one of these is achieved by way of verbal echoes and the other through what I will call the logic of the monument. The many echoes of Hamlet in Theobald’s play are quite apparent and help to establish a certain connection between the two plays. Indeed, these echoes can be said to constitute one of Double Falsehood’s characteristic features. In her book A Babble of Ancestral Voices, in which she works very hard to prove Theobald a plagiarist, Harriet C. Frazier writes, The greatest source of Shakespearian echoes in The Double Falsehood is unquestionably Hamlet . The apocryphal play is filled to overflowing with reminders of that Shakespearian play which the Eighteenth Century preferred to all others …. Perhaps it may not be too extreme to suggest that no other Shakespearian play would seem so markedly ‘Shakespearian’ to the general reader and the theatre audience of those first fifty years of the Eighteenth Century. By incorporating many aspects of Hamlet in The Double Falsehood, Theobald surely would more readily convince his audience of the authenticity of the latter than if he had chosen a less popular play to imitate.32

Frazier then proceeds to inventory more than two dozen instances of what she calls Theobald’s “wooly, half-echoes” of Hamlet (Frazier, Voices, 129). Some of these seem genuinely apt and reflect quite clearly an intimate relationship between the two plays: Duke Angelo, for instance, speaking in reference to his son, says, “[W]hy he hath of late / By importunity, the strain’d Petition, / Wrested our Leave of Absence from the Court” (DF, 1.1.26–28), and Frazier dutifully points us to Polonius’s reference to Laertes, “He hath, my lord, wrung from me my slow leave / By laboursome petition.”33 Also, Don Bernard lectures his daughter Leonora on the dangers of Julio’s courtship:

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I speak not This altogether to unbend your Affections to him: But the Meaning of what I say is, that you set such a Price upon yourself to him, as Many, and much his Betters, would buy you at; (and reckon those Virtues in you at the rate of their Scarcity;) to which if he come not up, you remain for a better Mart. (DF, 1.2.195–200)

And again we are directed to the corresponding moment in Hamlet : “From this time, daughter, / Be somewhat scanter of your maiden presence. / Set your entreatments at a higher rate / Than a command to parley” (Hamlet , 1.3.120–23).34 For Frazier, these verbal echoes stand as proof of Theobald’s unscrupulous plagiarisms and, in her view, render Double Falsehood simply a forgery. Yet, these echoes may well be more accurately understood not as signs of Theobald’s fraudulent mining of Hamlet for language to embed within his own play, but rather as the sounds of a particular haunting: Hamlet is not the Double Falsehood’s unacknowledged source, but rather the ghost that haunts it. In order to bolster her argument, Frazier points to Theobald’s work as an editor of Shakespeare: We know from Shakespeare Restor’d (1726), that the extensive editing of Hamlet was the Shakespearian task with which Theobald had been most deeply and most immediately involved only one year before The Double Falsehood appeared. There can be little doubt in the course of writing 132 pages of notes on Hamlet for incorporation in Shakespeare Restor’d (194 pages) that his mind would be saturated with all aspects of the play. (Frazier, Voices, 131)

As this passage suggests, Frazier’s case for plagiarism is underwritten by a fundamental confusion and conflation of the very different work represented by adaptation, on the one hand, and authorship, on the other. There may be any number of explanations of the presence of verbal hauntings in Double Falsehood, explanations that fall short of the charge of plagiarism. For one, those echoes may be original to the play Theobald was revising: Cardenio may well have encrypted verbal hauntings from Hamlet . This argument would serve in fact to strengthen Theobald’s claims for a Shakespearean original. Another (and perhaps more likely) possibility is that these verbal echoes represent nothing more than the material (textual) traces of a profound influence Hamlet had on Theobald as a reader, editor, and adapter of Shakespeare. This argument would serve to establish nothing more than Theobald’s authorship of those echoes from Hamlet (though

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this model of authorship would be largely free from such features as originality typically ascribed to it) and leave the rest of the play as more or less untouched by Theobald the author. Indeed, the verbal echoes of Hamlet could only be positive proof of plagiarism if Theobald were the sole author of Double Falsehood in its entirety rather than its adapter. Frazier’s argument, in other words, assumes as a premise the very conclusion she aims to draw: since there really was no Shakespearean original, Theobald must have written Double Falsehood himself; any echoes of Shakespeare we find in the play are merely Theobald’s bumbling attempts at imitating Shakespeare, and since we know that these echoes derive from Hamlet , Theobald could not have had in hand the Shakespearean original he claimed to be adapting. Such an argument obviously fails to compel, but by virtue of its obsession with the debate between the authentic and the counterfeit, it does serve to point to the second—and still more significant—way in which Hamlet haunts Cardenio: through the logic of the monument. Indeed, those same issues and concerns that are fundamental to Double Falsehood (and to Day’s nineteenth-century staging of it)—the contest between the authentic and the fraudulent, figured especially in the relation between legitimate and illegitimate copies; the nature and status of bodies, both living and dead; and the place or role of memory—are equally at stake in Hamlet . Charged by the ghost of his father to an unfailing remembrance (“Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me” [Hamlet , 1.5.91]), Hamlet vows a memory that is not only permanent—“Remember thee? / Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat / In this distracted globe” (Hamlet , 1.5.95–97)—but also solitary in nature: Remember thee? Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past That youth and observation copied there, And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain, Unmix’d with baser matter. (Hamlet , 1.5. 97–104)

Hamlet’s fine promise of enduring and solitary memory, an act simultaneously of absolute fidelity and filiality, is itself a renegotiation of what can be considered the crisis of the monument: confronted with the absence of the father figured in the ghost, together with his/its/their narrative of guilt

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and retribution, Hamlet is made to devise a solution to the problem of fratricide/regicide that is also a solution to the crisis of legitimacy. Hamlet’s solution begins with the monumentalization of the dead father in the lasting memory of the living son. Ironically, though, this act of homage—which is at the same time an act of obedience to the father and to nature (“If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not, / Let not the royal bed of Denmark be / A couch for luxury and damned incest” [Hamlet , 1.5.81–83]) and an act that depends upon memory in order to be viable—begins with a series of radical erasures of memory. Indeed, that which both legitimizes memory also delegitimizes the very act that makes memory possible in the first place: recollection—particularly recollection understood as a form of writing or inscription. In other words, remembrance (like remediation more generally) requires the production of copies—of Old Hamlet, for instance, or his call to revenge that Hamlet will overwrite upon traces of still older memories rendered obsolete by the loss of the father—somehow held in the mind in place of the originals. Hamlet of course understands that an intimate relation obtains between memory and writing, as marked by his desire to take literal note of the ghost’s multiple messages and their multiple meanings: “My tables. Meet it is I set it down / That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain— / At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark. / So, uncle, there you are. Now to my word. / It is ‘Adieu, adieu, remember me’” (Hamlet , 5.1.107–11).35 But what we can call the artificiality of these copies gives the lie to their assumed power to hold the authenticity of the original—detached (in this case by Claudius’s fratricidal act) from the original and therefore freefloating and available for a new or a reattachment. As the speech quoted above attests, forgetting is the founding act of memory and erasure is its vehicle. And this is exactly the crux of Hamlet’s confrontation with the monument: that which should enable the restoration of the absent father precisely because it is imagined as a simulacrum of the original and therefore a new site for cathexis—memory and its inscription in the mind—is revealed to be untenable. Inauthentic at its core, this memory-as-inscription can neither hold nor be held. Instead, it is fleeting and ephemeral precisely because it is only a metaphor, because it is simply a copy, the very existence of which is itself a manifestation of absolute inauthenticity. But what is the source of Hamlet’s fears about copies and, in spite of its status as inauthentic, his reliance upon the always fraudulent act of writing? The answer, I would argue, is Hamlet’s overriding anxiety that the illegitimacy that attaches to fraudulent copies attaches not only to Claudius (a satyr to Old Hamlet’s Hyperion) but, more devastatingly, also to himself

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as well (“My father’s brother—but no more like my father / Than I to Hercules” [Hamlet , 1.2.152–53]). Despite Hamlet’s frequent assertions of the fundamental difference between himself and Claudius, the distinction is not so absolute. Indeed, the play offers many points of congruence between Hamlet and Claudius that not only belie Hamlet’s famous “A little more than kin, and less than kind” assertion (Hamlet , 1.2.65) but that in fact serve to suggest that because they are both illegitimate copies of Old Hamlet, it is they who function in the play as a “counterfeit presentment of two brothers” (Hamlet , 3.4.54). Hamlet therefore depicts not one but two acts of fratricide.36 There is one congruity in particular that is perhaps the most significant of all, and that also concerns the linked issues of memory, writing, and the illegitimacy of copies: two explicit instances of forgery. The first is Claudius’s and is related by the ghost of Old Hamlet: Now, Hamlet, hear. ‘Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard, A serpent stung me—so the whole ear of Denmark Is by a forged process of my death Rankly abus’d—but know, thou noble youth, The serpent that did sting thy father’s life Now wears his crown. (Hamlet , 1.5.34–40)

The second is Hamlet’s writing at sea: the forged royal commission.37 This is also an important instance of Hamlet’s inability to forget—or, more aptly, his failure successfully to overwrite those “forms” and “pressures past / That youth and observation copied” onto the table of his memory. Suspecting Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (and behind them, Claudius, his “mighty opposite” [Hamlet , 5.2.62]), Hamlet steals then reads their secret commission and in response devises an alternate one that through the machinations of remediation will ultimately serve as their death warrant. Recounting these events to Horatio, Hamlet pauses briefly to dilate upon this remembered scene of secret writing: Being thus benetted round with villainies— Or I could make a prologue to my brains, They had begun the play—I sat me down, Devis’d a new commission, wrote it fair— I once did hold it, as our statists do, A baseness to write fair, and labour’d much How to forget that learning, but, sir, now

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It did me yeoman’s service. Wilt thou know Th’effect of what I wrote? (Hamlet , 5.2.29–37)

Integral to Hamlet’s success in this act of writing—which is emblematic of forgery—is Hamlet’s remembered ability to “write fair.” The lasting impression, one could say, of the young Hamlet’s handwriting lessons indeed do him “yeoman’s service” both in this critical scene and later in the play when the letters he has written to Claudius (for one) arrive at their destination.38 As this passage suggests, for Hamlet, writing is not merely an instance but rather the very form of failed forgetfulness. At the same time, writing emerges from the scene of the new commission as a selfconsciously imitative act. In other words, because writing is quite simply the production of copies intended to stand in for lost originals, Hamlet’s act of writing is fundamentally an act of forgery. This particular forgery, moreover, is legitimated by Hamlet’s strictly illegitimate use of his father’s signet ring; when asked by Horatio how the new commission was sealed, Hamlet responds, Why, even in that was heaven ordinant. I had my father’s signet in my purse, Which was the model of that Danish seal, Folded the writ up in the form of th’other, Subscrib’d it, gave’t th’impression, plac’d it safely, The changeling never known. (Hamlet 5.2.48–53)39

What this perhaps dizzying series of acts of writing and acts of copying illustrates is the degree to which Hamlet’s writing at sea serves to mark all writing as simulacral, or rather, to reveal the simulacral nature of all writing. Even Hamlet’s other writings in the play—his love letter to Ophelia, the lines he adds to The Murder of Gonzago, and the letters he sends to Claudius—are clearly less than authentic; or, to use another vocabulary, they are clearly performative in nature. Because they function only to the extent that they successfully obscure Hamlet, they are monuments to (dis)simulation. But even if this writing were deployed in the service of an authentic self-(re)presentation, it is always essentially an illegitimate and inauthentic copy of some absent, inaccessible, or mythic original. Hamlet’s interest in writing (which is, after all, one of the activities in which he participates most ardently throughout the course of the play) is his initial and his enduring response to the monument in general that is figured in the ghost of Old Hamlet. Charged equally with the duty to remember and to revenge, Hamlet writes. As such, the turn to writing emerges as an

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attempt—and perhaps the exemplary attempt—to memorialize through monumentalization. The ghost of Old Hamlet, which is itself immaterial in nature, can be said to materialize, or to make present, the enduring absence of the father’s (living) body, even as Hamlet’s reactive work as writer/monumentalizer can be said to be the (hopeless) attempt to restore that body. But the only material available, of course, is writing itself, and writing proves through the course of the play always to be forgery.

III The centrifugal motion identified above propels Hamlet ’s staging of the monument outward through Cardenio to its (next) encrypted location in Double Falsehood. But what is perhaps most astonishing about the logic of the monument is how thoroughly it serves not only to structure Hamlet , Cardenio, and Double Falsehood but also to organize the relation between them and the entire phenomenon of our periodic finding of Cardenio. For, indeed, the story of Cardenio does not end with its encryption in Theobald’s play. Having been recovered in the form of Double Falsehood, this lost body/play goes missing again almost immediately: when Theobald publishes his Works of Shakespeare in 1733, Cardenio/ Double Falsehood is once again missing. Readers and critics who understand Theobald’s play to be a forgery point especially to this absence: if he indeed had had manuscript versions of Cardenio which he believed to be authentically Shakespearean, how are we to understand Theobald’s decision not to include the play in his edition? The subsequent disappearance of all three manuscripts Theobald claimed to possess has also proved helpful to these disintegrators. In the introduction to his 1920 edition of Double Falsehood, Walter Graham necessarily addresses this concern and offers a rather speculative possibility. Graham reminds us of the relative lack of importance and value typically attached to manuscripts in the early eighteenth century and points to the 1744 sale of Theobald’s library after his death. It is reasonable to believe, Graham suggests, that as a result of this sale William Warburton (Theobald’s sometime assistant in his edition of Shakespeare’s works, and later his adversary) “had come into possession of one or more of Theobald’s manuscript copies.” Graham then suggests further that these “manuscript copies” were subsequently lost when “[i]n or about 1750 Warburton’s infamous cook destroyed in a memorable holocaust a number of plays by Shakespeare.”40 While this perhaps explains the loss of the three manuscript copies, it does not answer the question of Theobald’s omission of Double

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Falsehood or Cardenio from his edition of Shakespeare’s plays. The resolution of this matter, Graham argues, lies in the decidedly less fanciful realm of copyright. The omission of the play from Theobald’s edition, Graham declares, “should be no cause for disbelief in Theobald’s honesty.” He continues: To have included the play would presumably have interfered with Theobald’s copyright of it, or at least with the profits of the owner of this copyright, which still had eight years to run. Under these circumstances, Theobald, or those holding the copyright, would not wish to have it disturbed. It is surely worthy of note that Theobald makes a deliberate reference to Double Falsehood in the notes. (Graham, 11)

John Freehafer offers a further clarification: in 1728 Theobald sold the copyright to Double Falsehood to John Watts. Freehafer also suggests that the three manuscript copies were part of this transaction.41 This would mean, of course, that when he assembled his edition of Shakespeare, Theobald literally had no legal right to Cardenio/Double Falsehood and therefore could not include it in his edition. One further point: it is important to stress that when he contracted with Jacob Tonson to edit the plays of Shakespeare, what Theobald in effect was agreeing to undertake (in another version of the argument by descent discussed above) was in fact a revision of the earlier Tonson edition of Shakespeare produced by Pope, which was itself a revision of the still-earlier Tonson edition prepared by Nicholas Rowe in 1709.42 As Peter Seary demonstrates, Tonson based his legal claim to this succession of Shakespeare editions upon his belief that “the emendations and other textual matter of his editors” fell under the provisions of the 1709 Statute of Queen Anne that provided a fourteen-year copyright, and “Tonson attempted to reinforce his claims to perpetual copyright in the original material by claiming successively the fourteen-year copyrights in the work of each of his editors.”43 In any event, Tonson’s Shakespeare copyrights would not have included Theobald’s own Double Falsehood, which was itself protected by copyright and by the Letters Patent issued to Theobald in 1727.44 These are reasonable conclusions to the questions of the absence of Double Falsehood from the 1733 Works of Shakespeare; and yet, they do not seem completely satisfactory as the final word on Theobald’s Shakespeare. Indeed, Theobald’s edition of Shakespeare’s collected works cannot be used to explain the nature of Cardenio/Double Falsehood. We cannot say

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that the edition collects only genuine or authentic Shakespeare and therefore excludes Cardenio/Double Falsehood; nor can it be claimed that the edition is based upon the corpus of plays as established by all of Theobald’s preceding editors and therefore has no place (or even knowledge of) Cardenio/Double Falsehood. Rather, I would like to suggest that it is Cardenio/Double Falsehood that can be used to explain the nature of Theobald’s edition of Shakespeare’s works. Even as Cardenio/Double Falsehood itself is structured by the very idea of the monument, so too is Theobald’s larger Shakespearean project. Articulated throughout his vast work on the playwright—from poems in imitation, theatrical adaptations, Shakespeare Restor’d, and the Double Falsehood adaptation—Theobald’s work on and in relation to Shakespeare is always imagined as the afterlife of a remembered presence. This project—forged through the tension between authenticity and fraud, the contested status of the present/absent authorial body, and the work of memory—culminates in his collected Works of Shakespeare, the inaugural instance of the production of a modern edition of a modern classic of English literature. In his preface to his edition, Theobald identifies his undertaking of the project of the collected works as akin to entering the great poet’s mausoleum: The Attempt to write upon SHAKESPEARE is like going into a large, a spacious, and a splendid Dome thro’ the Conveyance of a narrow and obscure Entry. A Glare of Light suddenly breaks upon you, beyond what the Avenue at first promis’d: and a thousand Beauties of Genius and Character, like so many gaudy Apartments pouring at once upon the Eye, diffuse and throw themselves out to the Mind. (Theobald, i)45

And though Theobald is a lover of Shakespeare, he understands that the “thousand Beauties” require the critical editor’s gaze—and labor: “The Prospect is too wide to come within the Compass of a single View: ‘tis a gay Confusion of pleasing Objects, too various to be enjoyed but in a general Admiration; and they must be separated, and ey’d distinctly, in order to give the proper Entertainment” (Theobald, i). As the rest of the Preface and, of course, the edition it introduces together make clear, it is the labor of the editor’s eye that yields this “proper Entertainment.” Theobald concludes his Preface first by surveying his many, his countless, labors on the edition: “a faithful Collation of all the printed Copies,” the complete reading of “Hall and Holinshead’s Chronicles in the Reigns concern’d; all the Novels in Italian, from which our Author had borrow’d any of his plots,” as well

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as Plutarch, Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, “and above 800 old English Plays” (Theobald, lxvii-lxviii). He then dismisses all of that work as a labor of love, and, once again, the figure of the restored authorial body emerges ghost-like from the textual monument to bear witness to his own immortal greatness: But as no Labour of Mine can be equivalent to the dear and ardent Love I bear for Shakespeare, so, if the Publick shall be pleas’d to allow that He owes any Thing to my Willingness and Endeavours of restoring Him; I shall reckon the Part of my Life so engag’d, to have been very happily employ’d: and put Myself, with great Submission, to be try’d by my Country in the Affair. (Theobald, lxviii)

In many ways we have returned to Hamlet and its staging of the relation between corporeality and textuality, bodies and copies. For it is Hamlet that emerges as both central—and, in fact, generative—in the early eighteenth-century production of Shakespeare’s corpus, beginning with Theobald’s groundbreaking critical and editorial work.46 Theobald’s Shakespeare Restor’d, his powerful critique of Pope’s errors as an editor of Shakespeare manifested in his 1725 edition of the plays, makes clear Theobald’s understanding of the restorative nature of his relation to Shakespeare and Shakespearean texts. “SHAKESPEARE’s Works ,” Theobald writes, have always appear’d to me like what he makes his HAMLET compare the World to, an unweeded Garden grown to Seed: And I am sorry there is still reason to complain, the Weeds in him are so very sparingly thin’d, that, not to speak out of compass, a thousand rank and unsightly ones are left to stare us in the Face, and clog the Delight of the expected Prospect.47

While certainly a convenient way to allow Theobald to ventriloquize Shakespeare himself on the decomposed state of Shakespearean textual affairs, this reference to Hamlet is something more prophetic altogether as it in fact predicts the nature of the exact argument (or, to use Theobald’s term, the exact “Specimen”) that will constitute what one could call the body of his analysis, Hamlet itself: I can scarce suspect it will be thought, if I begin my Animadversions upon the Tragedy of HAMLET, that I have been partial to myself in picking out this Play, as one more fertile in Errors than any of the rest: On the contrary,

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I chose it for Reasons quite opposite. It is, perhaps, the best known, and one of the most favourite Plays of our Author …. Yet give me Leave to say, what I am ready to prove, it is not without very gross Corruptions. Nor does it stand by itself for Faults in Mr. POPE’s Edition: No, it is a Specimen only of the epidemical Corruption … which runs thro’ all the Work.48

Theobald undertakes these two intimately related projects: the thoroughly self-conscious and deliberate attempt to restore a Shakespearean original and the wholly un-self-conscious and more or less accidental renegotiation of a Hamletian double helix of the discourses of copies and the fate of the material body.49 Theobald’s Shakespearean work represents a critical moment in the development of the modern idea of authorship—in the figure of the author made available, that is, by the consolidation of those cultural forces encrypted within the discourse of the monument. Moreover, the emergence of proprietary authorship was enabled by the prior development of proprietary editorship—an accomplishment that was achieved, it is worth stressing, primarily by people such as Theobald (and also Rowe and Pope before him, and Edmond Malone and Edward Dowden after, to name only a few of the major figures in this history), specifically through their efforts in the editing of Shakespeare and in the production of an approximately stable Shakespeare canon. It is also important to note that this invention of Shakespeare’s canon could only have been carried out on the entire body of work reasonably (though not without contention) ascribed to him. In other words, as attested by the long list of landmark editorial and publishing events related to the project of the founding of Shakespeare as the national poet, beginning with Rowe’s edition and continuing successively through Pope, Theobald, Johnson, Malone, and beyond, proprietary editorship and then authorship were not established on single works; no edition of a single play or poem could adequately substantiate the claims of either editorship or authorship. This was something reserved for the collected works—to which, one can say, the editing and publishing enterprise presided over by

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the Tonsons had itself been dedicated and upon which it was to some large extent predicated. * * * By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the monumental task of establishing the canon of Shakespeare’s works had largely been achieved, even if (as was certainly the case) there was some lingering uncertainty and even if there remained a staggering mass of details concerning the exact nature of the texts themselves that were very much still under debate. It was the varied efforts of a long line of Shakespeare editors, many of them operating within the Tonson cartel, that accomplished this goal and as a consequence provided something like a functional stability of those works attributed to Shakespeare with what was broadly agreed to be of sufficient authority. By this point most editors, publishers, and scholars agreed that plays such as Edward III and Arden of Faversham, for example, were not Shakespeare’s, while Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen quite certainly were.50 And by this point, accordingly, Shakespeare had moved well down the path toward becoming “Shakespeare,” a name that no longer exclusively (or perhaps even primarily) signified a man or a poet, but rather conjured a more or less known and stable (or stabilized) body of work that was in the very midst of a cultural monumentalization. From this perspective, the Shakespeare editors had succeeded in constructing a canon of generally accepted texts that constituted a founding corpus of English literary greatness—even if, as the British Critic reviewer whose article was discussed in the Introduction above wrote, the actual work of this construction was at times something of a bloody affair: “They have purged and castrated him, and tattooed and beplaistered him, and cauterized and phlebotomised him with all the studied refinement, that the utmost skill of critical barbarity could suggest.”51 For this reviewer, the Shakespeare texts bear the scars of “Johnson’s dagger,” the “rent envious Pope has made,” and the wounds where “the well-beloved Bowdler stabbed” (British Critic, 372). This work of the Shakespeare editors in constructing the Shakespeare corpus, wounds and all, could be characterized as the effort to assemble a body of texts into a complete whole, even though this great labor at times included acts of rejection, excision, and removal of apocryphal plays and poems. No sooner is this corpus assembled, however, that efforts begin to disassemble it, to eliminate and reduce and redact. The story of this countermovement in the history of Shakespeare remediations

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will be the topic of the following chapter. In particular, I will turn to one of the British Critic reviewer’s many targets: the edition of Shakespeare produced by “the well-beloved Bowdler,” the Family Shakespeare, the first expurgated edition of Shakespeare’s plays and perhaps the most popular and enduring editions of Shakespeare through the nineteenth and into the early years of the twentieth century. This project was the work of the brother-and-sister pair of Henrietta and Thomas Bowdler—the first of two brother-sister duos (the second being Mary and Charles Lamb, to be discussed in the following two chapters) whose work as Shakespeare remediators served to establish two enduring traditions: redaction and retelling.

Notes 1. This gesture insures the joke, the comic resolution of the potentially fraught situation within the theater; but it also belies Day’s recognition of Theobald as the play’s actual author. There is the moment, for example, in which he talks about some “unfortunate words” placed in the lead character’s mouth by “Theobald’s Shakespeare” (W. C. Day, Behind the Footlights; or, the Stage as I Knew It [London: Frederick Warne and Co., 1885], 66). 2. See Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), esp. Chapter 5, “Nationalizing the Corpus,” pp. 185–222. See also Robert D. Hume, “Before the Bard: ‘Shakespeare’ in Early Eighteenth-Century London,” ELH 64 (1997): 41–75. 3. Day comments further upon those infelicities of the play itself that contributed to the evening’s disaster: As scene succeeded scene, no opportunity was allowed to escape where the dialogue gave an opening for badinage, or was capable of double entendre, and as the drama, written in a coarse age, presented many such chances, it may be readily imagined what desperate uphill work it was for the performers to preserve decent gravity and play the tragedy to its close. (Day, 66)

4. Dobson discusses several instances of such appearances of the ghost of Shakespeare (or, as sometimes represented, Shakespeare as Old Hamlet), including the early example provided by the prologue (spoken by Thomas Betterton) to John Dryden’s 1679 adaptation of Troilus: Troilus and Cressida, or, Truth Found Too Late; Charles Gilden’s 1700 Measure for Measure; and George Granville’s 1701 The Jew of Venice. See Dobson, 72–75, 117–22, 123–25. See also Dobson’s discussion of Garrick, 165–76. 5. Day’s narrative itself depends for its rhetorical power to an extent upon its status as memoir.

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6. See The Quest for Cardenio: Shakespeare, Fletcher, Cervantes and the Lost Play, eds. David Carnegie and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), esp. Valerie Wayne, “Don Quixote and Shakespeare’s Collaborative Turn to Romance,” 217–38. 7. Roger Chartier, Cardenio Between Cervantes and Shakespeare: The Story of a Lost Play, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 180. 8. For a brief discussion of Love’s Labour’s Won, see The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 803. 9. Jonathan Goldberg, “Shakespearean Characters,” in his Shakespeare’s Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 39. 10. For an important discussion of the ghost—that figure whose appearance is always a reappearance—that serves to structure our relationship to temporality, see Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994). For a counterargument (to Derrida’s study), see Richard Halpern, “An Impure History of Ghosts: Derrida, Marx, Shakespeare,” in Marxist Shakespeares, eds. Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow (London: Routledge, 2000), 31–52. 11. Jennifer Richards and James Knowles, “Introduction: Shakespeare’s Late Plays,” in Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings, eds. Richards and Knowles (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 18. 12. Richards and Knowles, 19; my emphasis. Jonathan Hope, for example, in his book The Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays: A Socio-Linguistic Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), offers a sustained sociolinguistic analysis of Theobald’s play and, having first made the pertinent observation that Theobald’s source text itself may have been “a restoration adaptation of a renaissance text” (91), presents compelling evidence to set aside accusations of forgery while at the same time demonstrating the case for the collaborative authorship—Shakespeare’s and Fletcher’s, that is—of the play that stands behind Double Falsehood; see Hope, 89–100. 13. As many readers and critics have noted, the front matter to the Folio serves to introduce and establish the central literary ambition of the entire project: the construction of the monument appropriate to Shakespeare’s greatness. The dedicatory poems (like the frontispiece) begin this process (see The First Folio of Shakespeare: The Norton Facsimile, ed. Charlton Hinman [New York: W. W. Norton, 1968]). Among these verses, the poem by L(eonard) Digges entitled “To the Memorie / of the deceased Authour Maister W. Shakespeare” contains the following lines: Shake-speare, at length thy pious fellowes giue The world thy Workes: thy Workes, by which, out-liue Thy Tombe, thy name must[;] when that stone is rent,

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And Time dissolues thy Stratford Moniment, Here we aliue shall view thee still. This Booke, When Brasse and Marble fade, shall make thee looke Fresh to all Ages: when Posteritie Shall loath what’s new, thinke all is prodegie That is not Shake-speares; eu’ry Line, each Verse Here shall reuiue, redeeme thee from thy Herse. (First Folio of Shakespeare, 15)

14.

15.

16.

17.

While the logic of Digges’s immortality-through-writing trope (his verse over “herse” theory) seems to ensure Shakespeare’s redemption from the tomb, what the poem actually suggests is that on that metaphorical last day, the tomb will be discovered to be empty, and the body quite gone—if only due to its prior relocation into a reconstructed, reconstituted verse. But even for all of his perhaps conventional redefinition of monument and marble, the poem nevertheless seems to register the sense that there is indeed some residual something that emerges from the empty hearse—some trace, some memory, perhaps, that while not material in nature (it cannot be reduced, for example, to texts) is present all the same, if only as the demand for a body in the manner of a ghost. For a provocative discussion of monuments, texts, and Shakespeare, see Lori Humphrey Newcomb, “‘If that which is lost be not found’: Monumental Bodies, Spectacular Bodies in The Winter’s Tale,” in Ovid and the Renaissance Body, ed. Goran V. Stanivukovic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 239–59. For a discussion of the thanatological nature of the textual editing of Shakespeare, see Laurie E. Maguire, “Composition/decomposition: Singular Shakespeare and the Death of the Author,” in The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality, ed. Andrew Murphy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 135–53. Lewis Theobald, Double Falshood; Or, the Distrest Lovers (London, 1728), A3. Subsequent references appear parenthetically, DF, followed by pagination. Brean Hammond offers a useful discussion of the “party politics” of the entire Double Falsehood story, including Theobald’s appeal to Dodington, “the powerful Whig patron” (The Double Falsehood; Or, the Distrest Lovers, ed. Brean Hammond [London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010], 20), as well as the play’s general “’Whiggish’ cast” (Hammond, 63). See also Hammond, “Shakespeare discoveries and forgeries,” in Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, eds. Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 78–96. Stephan Orgel, “The Authentic Shakespeare,” Representations 21 (1988): 5.

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18. The veracity of this claim remains subject to interpretation. For a powerful alternative reading to the one that underwrites this chapter, see Tiffany Stern, “’Whether one did Contrive, the Other Write,/Or one Fram’d the Plot, the Other did Indite’: Fletcher and Theobald as Collaborative Writers,” in eds. Carnegie and Taylor, 115–30. 19. The Dictionary of National Biography entry s.v. “John Downes” also lists Downes’s participation “as a comedian” with the Duke of York’s Company, as well as his membership in Betterton’s Company at Lincoln’s Inn Fields (Dictionary of National Biography [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993]). 20. John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, ed. Montague Summers (London: The Fortune Press, 1928), 21. 21. Downes, 24. For an interesting analysis of an analogous argument by genealogical provenance, see Orgel’s discussion in Imagining Shakespeare: A History of Texts and Visions (Palgrave, 2003) of the Chandos portrait, popularly held to have belonged to Davenant and then to Betterton after him: It is clear that the real force of the Chandos portrait’s claims [of authenticity] lay, for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in its association specifically with the theatrical tradition: with Davenant, who, whether or not he knew Shakespeare as a child, was the link between the old stage and the new; with Betterton, the greatest Shakespearean actor of the age, who lived on into the eighteenth century. (77)

22. W. W. Greg, Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration (London, 1939–1959), I, 61. 23. The complicated story of the Cardenio/Double Falsehood textual genealogies is usefully summarized in Stephan Kukowski, “The Hand of John Fletcher in Double Falsehood,” Shakespeare Survey 43 (1991): 81–89, esp. 81–82. See also John Freehafer (“Cardenio, By Shakespeare and Fletcher,” PMLA 84 [1969]: 501–13), who argues convincingly for Theobald’s integrity and for the Double Falsehood to be based upon a Shakespeare and Fletcher original; and Metz, Four Plays Ascribed to Shakespeare (New York: Garland, 1982). See also Gary Taylor, “A History of The History of Cardenio,” in eds. Carnegie and Taylor, 11–61. For his part, Hammond argues that Theobald may well have had knowledge of the Moseley entry; see Hammond, 80–6. 24. A note of caution is sounded by Tiffany Stern (note #18), who (in response to an earlier version of the present discussion) correctly reminds readers that Theobald was also editing the works of Beaumont and Fletcher at virtually the exact same moment he produced his Double Falsehood and moreover, that for Theobald

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editing meant emendation, and emendation meant becoming the author(s) and embracing his/their style, a tendency that, as has been shown, came naturally to him anyway. Emendations to the works of Shakespeare, for instance, were only made when Theobald had ‘a very high Degree of moral Certainty’ as to their correctness (1733, I, xlii). How deep and ‘morally certain’ must his knowledge of Beaumont and Fletcher have been, given that by the year of Double Falsehood’s publication he had made roughly ‘two thousand emendations’ [Daily Journal, 26 November 1728] to their texts (though his edition of their works was only to come out posthumously)? (Stern, 125)

25. This is the passage as printed in the second edition, slightly—though for the present discussion perhaps importantly—revised by Theobald as part of his response to precisely those suspicions concerning the authenticity of his claims for an early seventeenth-century source. The first edition reads, “[M]y Partiality for Shakespeare makes me wish, that Every Thing which is good, or pleasing, in our Tongue, had been owing to his Pen” (qtd. in Freehafer, 509). Commenting on the contemporary lingering doubts about the play, particularly concerning the question of Fletcher’s presence in it, Freehafer writes, [T]he question was still present when Theobald issued the second edition of Double Falsehood about two months [after the first]…. Whereas in his first preface Theobald had merely hinted that some of the good things in his play might not be Shakespeare’s, in his second he nearly conceded that they might be Fletcher’s. (509)

26. See, for example, Robert F. Fleissner, “The Likely Misascription of Cardenio (and Thereby Double Falsehood) in Part to Shakespeare,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 97 (1996): 217–30. 27. The critic most identified with (and perhaps most obsessed with) proving Theobald a plagiarist and Double Falsehood a forgery was Harriet C. Frazier, especially in her book A Babble of Ancestral Voices: Shakespeare, Cervantes , and Theobald (The Hague: Mouton, 1974); but see also her article “Theobald’s The Double Falsehood: A Revision of Shakespeare’s Cardenio,” Comparative Drama (1967): 219–33. In order to make her case against Theobald, Frazier pays particular attention to his adaptation (or alteration) of Shakespeare’s Richard II, very carefully charting instances of Theobald’s borrowings, rearrangings, and, even more importantly, his ventriloquizing of Shakespeare; see Frazier, Voices, 48–60. 28. For some critics, the argument for another moment of remediation between the early seventeenth century Cardenio and Theobald’s Double Falsehood has become increasingly compelling. Hammond (as one instance) is convinced that a Restoration-era adaptation of Cardenio stands between Shakespeare and Fletcher, one the one side, and Theobald on the other:

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In the form in which Theobald published it, the play is a simple enough exercise in early eighteenth-century love-and-honour intrigue, though with enough interesting discrepancies of style and structure both to vindicate most of Theobald’s claims for its provenance and to suggest that another adapter too may have been involved in rewriting Cardenio before Theobald himself set about his own redactions. (Hammond, 48)

29. David Bergeron, Shakespeare’s Romances and the Royal Family (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1985), 114, 116, quoted in Richard Wilson, “Unseasonable Laughter: The Context of Cardenio,” in Shakespeare’s Late Plays (note #11, above), 195. 30. For another powerful reading of Shakespeare’s “‘last’ late plays” (Cardenio/Double Falsehood, Henry VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen) that as a “distinctive group … questions and even mocks the optimistic assumptions” of the Romances, see Julia Briggs, “Tears at the Wedding: Shakespeare’s Last Phase,” in Shakespeare’s Late Plays (note #11, above), 210. 31. Wilson, 207. Compare this to the more (conventionally) comic use of a coffin trick in Francis Beaumont’s great play, The Knight of the Burning Pestle (London, 1607?). 32. Frazier, Voices, 130. Frazier also cites—only to dismiss as inadequate—previous work by Leonard Schwartzstein (“The Text of ‘The Double Falsehood,’” Notes and Queries 199 [1954]: 472 and Kenneth Muir (Shakespeare as Collaborator [London: Methuen, 1960], 154): “There are not only many more Shakespearian echoes in The Double Falsehood than either Schwartzstein or Muir indicates [the former identifying a total of five, the latter a total of four], but these echoes point more precisely to Theobald’s authorship of The Double Falsehood than either critic would seem to realize” (Voices, 130). 33. William Shakespeare, Hamlet , ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982), 1.2.58–59. 34. See Frazier, Voices, 132–33. Other echoes she identifies are perhaps less compelling—the mad Julio’s warning to Violante, “This world is full of Coz’ners, very full; / Young Virgins must be wary in their Ways” (Double Falsehood, 4.1.92–93) and Hamlet’s warning to Ophelia, “We are arrant knaves all; / Believe none of us. Go thy way to a nunnery” (Hamlet , 3.1.130–31)—while others seem perhaps unrelated: Julio’s renunciation of his false friend, “Treacherous, damn’d Henriquez” (Double Falsehood, 3.1.5) and Hamlet’s cursing of Claudius, “Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindles villain” (Hamlet , 2.2.608); see Frazier, Voices, 132–37. 35. Goldberg’s critique of the notion of interiority—and the role of writing to it—includes an important discussion of this same speech; Goldberg writes, “Remembering is at the same time erasing ‘all pressures past.’ For the memory to be supplemented, it must also be supplanted. The mind is a locus

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of copia; it is a book” (“Shakespearean Characters,” 45). Also, Goldberg develops the idea of Hamlet’s articulation of “the spacing of writing”: Hamlet is not torn between his “own” desire and the paternal command but, rather, divided within the paternal that writes his desire and in which it is written. Hamlet’s divided identity—and with it his delays and deferrals, his resistance to the ghostly plot, his inability to act, and his compulsions to repeat—are the result of his identification with his father’s words. It is identification that splits Hamlet. The depth of his interiority is his foldedness within a text that enfolds him and that cannot be unfolded. (“Shakespearean Characters,” 45, 46)

36. This is in addition to the other metaphorical brotherings in the play: Hamlet and Laertes (“Let my disclaiming from a purpos’d evil / Free me so far in your most gracious thoughts,” Hamlet offers Laertes, “That I have shot my arrow o’er the house / And hurt my brother” [Hamlet , 5.2.237–40]) and Hamlet and Fortinbras. Relatedly, I have often wondered how we would reconsider the play if the actors playing Claudius and Hamlet—as opposed to Claudius and Gertrude—were cast as generationally similar, thereby emphasizing the fraternal relation between them. 37. It is interesting that this scene of forgery—of fraudulent textual reproduction that in this period and beyond comes to be known as piracy—should have occurred in such close proximity to a (reported) scene of another kind of piracy upon the sea. For a discussion of forgery and piracy “before copyright,” see Max W. Thomas, “Eschewing Credit: Heywood, Shakespeare, and Plagiarism Before Copyright,” New Literary History 31 (2000): 277–93. 38. For a sustained series of meditations on letters and writing in early modern drama, see Goldberg, “Hamlet’s Hand,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 307–27, “Rebel Letters: Postal Effects from Richard II to Henry IV,” Renaissance Drama n.s. 19 (1988): 3–28, and Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); see also Shakespeare’s Hand (note #9, above). 39. But even as these lines suggest, old Hamlet’s ring was itself somewhat less than fully authentic, being as it was merely “the model”—that is to say, a copy—of the Danish seal that would guarantee authority. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, however, die precisely upon the effective communicative power of this errant copy, this simulacrum of Danish authority that nevertheless functions in the world as fully authentic. See also Goldberg: “Hamlet writes his (father’s) name with the signet/signature that impresses him. Sealed in that text, he can say, ‘Let be’…. Let, that is, stop/permit. Finally, he can entirely voice his father’s text, speak as a ghost. ‘I am dead’…, he reiterates, the impossible sentence that inscribes voice within the iterability of writing” (“Shakespearean Characters,” 47).

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40. Graham, introduction to Theobald, Double Falshood, ed. Graham, Western Reserve Studies, 1.6 (1920), 11. 41. See Freehafer, 511–13. Peter Seary, in Lewis Theobald and the Editing of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), reproduces the 31 July 1728 original assignment to Watts and notes the possibility that one of the manuscript copies may have survived into the later years of the eighteenth century; Seary cites an advertisement for a revival of Theobald’s play printed in The Gazetteer that may substantiate this claim: “The original Manuscript of this play is now treasured up in the Museum of Covent-Garden Playhouse.” As Seary notes, this manuscript “presumably was burned in the great fire at the theatre on 19 September 1808” (220). Also, in the Preface to his edition of the collected works of Shakespeare, Theobald alludes to several plays that remain uncollected; see Theobald, Preface to the Works of Shakespeare, ed. Hugh G. Dick. The Augustan Reprint Society (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1949). Near the beginning of his biographical sketch of Shakespeare (for which Nicholas Rowe’s account is the source), and in an effort to get the youthful Shakespeare out of Stratford and into the London theatrical world as quickly as possible, Theobald points to the prodigious dramatic output: Besides, considering he has left us six and thirty Plays, which are avow’d to be genuine; (to throw out of the Question those Seven, in which his Title is disputed: tho’ I can, beyond all Controversy, prove some Touches in every one of them to come from his Pen:)… the Interval of Time, necessarily required for the finishing of so many Dramatic Pieces, obliges us to suppose he threw himself very early upon the Play-house. (Preface, vii)

42. Seary reproduces the “Articles of Agreement” between Theobald and Tonson for the 1733 Works ; see Seary, 215–18. 43. Seary, 134. Citing the succession of Tonson editors and their editions (“Theobald’s Shakespeare is based on Pope’s second edition [1728], which was based on Rowe’s third edition [1714], which was based on the fourth folio [1685]”), Seary argues that Theobald’s “decision to use Pope’s second edition as the basis of his own was not, in fact, a matter in which Theobald was free to exercise choice” (133) and concludes, “it was as a consequence of legal and commercial considerations and in defiance of editorial logic that Theobald’s edition was based on Pope’s. Theobald’s choice of copy must be attributed to circumstances of publishing history and not to ignorance” (135). 44. Although it lies beyond the scope of the present discussion, the suggestion that the absence of Double Falsehood/Cardenio from Theobald’s edition of Shakespeare’s plays is in fact a matter of copyright and the evolution of the

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early eighteenth-century legal history of personal (and intellectual) property marks an important line of argument in need of further consideration and elaboration. Among other concerns raised by this case is the question of the relative priority of the proprietary editor over the proprietary author, an issue I address later in this discussion. In the Preface to the collected works, Theobald makes the case for both Shakespeare’s status as an English classic and for Theobald’s use of the critical editorial “Method” applied to classical texts by the pioneering efforts of Richard Bentley: “Shakespeare’s Case has in a great Measure resembled That of a corrupt Classic; and, consequently, the Method of Cure was likewise to bear a Resembance…. To this End I have ventur’d on a Labour, that is the first Assay of the kind on any modern Author whatever.” Theobald (not without good cause) dismisses Bentley’s edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost for overstepping the proper bounds of the editor and “giv[ing] us his Corrections as the Original Text of the Author”—an act, Theobald concludes, that reveals “the chief Turn of his Criticism is plainly to shew the World, that if Milton did not write as He would have him, he ought to have wrote so” (Preface, xxxix). In the absence of a more recent effort on the life of Theobald, Richard Foster Jones’s 1919 study, Lewis Theobald: His Contribution to English Scholarship, with Some Published Letters (1919; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1966), remains generally useful. Theobald, Shakespeare Restor’d; Or, a Specimen of the Many Errors, as well Committed, as Unemended, by Mr. Pope in his Late Edition of this Poet. Designed Not only to correct the said Edition, but to restore the True Reading of Shakespeare in all the Editions ever yet publish’d (1726; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1970), ii. Though, as noted, readers are still awaiting a new full-scale biography of Theobald, his work as an editor of Shakespeare continues to be much discussed. In addition to general treatment of Theobald’s editorial work—particularly his emendations—see Caroline Roberts, “Lewis Theobald and Theories of Editing,” in Reading Readings: Essays on Shakespeare Editing in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Joanna Gondris (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), 188–205; Simon Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearian Textual Criticism and Representation of Scholarly Labour, 1725–1765 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); and Marcus Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing: The Beginnings of Interpretive Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Theobald, Shakespeare Restor’d, vii. A few years after this Theobald would expand upon his initially more or less gentle critique of Pope’s work as an editor. In the preface to his own edition of Shakespeare’s plays, The Works of Shakespeare (London, 1734), Theobald, writing in response to Pope’s

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inflammatory depiction of him in the Dunciad, retaliates in language fully enmeshed in the discourse of bodies and copies: The same mangled Condition [of Shakespeare’s texts manifest in Rowe’s edition of 1709] has been acknowledg’d too by Mr. Pope, who publish’d him likewise, pretended to have collated the old Copies, and yet seldom has corrected the Text but to its Injury…. I have made it evident throughout my Remarks, that he has frequently inflicted a Wound where he intended a Cure. He has acted with regard to our Author, as an Editor, whom LIPSIUS mentions, did with regard to MARTIAL; Inventus est nescio quis Popa, qui non vitia ejus, sed ipsum, excîdit. He has attack’d him like an unhandy Slaughterman; and not lopp’d off the Errors, but the Poet. (Preface, xxxv)

49. In his essay, “‘Came errour here by mysse of man’: Editing and the Metaphysics of Presence” (Yearbook of English Studies 29 [1999]: 118–37), Andrew Murphy offers a powerful reading of editing and the informing idea (or fantasy) of “the transliteration of physical presence into textual embodiment” (126). On eighteenth-century editions of Shakespeare, Murphy writes, In Pope, Theobald, and their successors, author and text are conflated into a single corporeal entity. The body of the author-text is imagined as physically afflicted and that affliction is seen as being compounded by what each editor considers to be the pernicious ministrations of his inept predecessors. Each edition is an effort to set this situation right, to restore to health the authorial-textual body. But no act of textual surgery ever brings the process of invention to an end. (131)

50. As it happens, both of these “new” Shakespeare plays, Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen, were plays that Shakespeare wrote in collaboration with other dramatists—George Wilkins, in the case of Pericles , and John Fletcher, in the case of The Two Noble Kinsmen, Henry VIII, and (as this chapter discusses, Cardenio). The matter of early modern collaborative playwriting is an area within Shakespeare and early modern drama studies more generally currently experiencing renewed attention; see, for example, the Introduction to Gordon McMullan’s edition of Henry VIII (Arden Shakespeare, Third Series, 2000) and, similarly, the Introduction to Suzanne Gossett’s edition of Pericles (Arden Shakespeare, Third Series, 2004). 51. The British Critic, April 1822, 372–80, 372.

CHAPTER 3

Redaction

He was approved by his own age, admired by the next, and is revered, and almost adored by the present. —Elizabeth Montagu, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare (1769)1

The Bowdler’s Family Shakespeare was first published anonymously in 1807 as a volume containing twenty plays, and again in an enlarged second edition of 1818 containing all the plays except Pericles .2 The work would in fact be published in as many as twenty editions in a variety of formats by the end of the century.3 The first edition, which we now know to have been the unaided work of Harriet (as Henrietta was called), provides very little by way of introduction: on its title page it offers an admonitory and legitimizing line from Addison—“The Stage might be made a perpetual Source of the most noble and useful Entertainment, were it under proper Regulations” (The Spectator, 93, 16 June 1711)—and this is followed by a short Preface in which the expurgatory urge is quickly identified: Though the works of our immortal Bard have been presented to the public in a great variety of editions; and are already the ornament of every library, and the delight of every reader, I flatter myself, that the present publication may still claim the attention, and obtain the approbation, of those who value

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every literary production in proportion to the effect which it may produce in a religious and moral point of view.4

As this Preface explains, the desire to expurgate Shakespeare’s plays—to omit, that is, “every thing that could give just offence to the religious and virtuous mind”—serves the admirable social purpose of rendering the plays available “to the young reader … unmixed with any thing that can raise a blush on the cheek of modesty” (FS 1807, vii). It is hoped, evidently, that the belatedness of this undertaking—the works of Shakespeare, after all, had long since been enshrined as the “ornament of every library”—will not be an obstacle to the realization of the dream of the purified text. With having purged the plays of “[m]any vulgar, and all indecent expressions” and having “sometimes curtailed” the “uninteresting or absurd scene,” the Family Shakespeare is prepared to fulfill its design: “to be read in private societies, and to be placed in the hands of young persons of both sexes” (FS 1807, xi). Bowdler’s project, we are assured, is based upon the twinned beliefs in the value that Shakespeare’s plays ought to possess, on the one hand, and on the other, the acknowledgment, avowed by other writers and critics alike, that there is much in Shakespeare that stands in manifest need of improvement undertaken in the spirit of understanding and generosity and articulated through the labors of purification in order that the moral qualities of the plays may shine forth. Lest any reader remain unconvinced of this need for such purification, Bowdler both puts blame where it is properly due and directs the reader’s attention to a helpfully corroborating testimony. First, the fact that “his Plays contain much that is vulgar, and much that is indelicate,” emerges, perhaps ironically, as a function of Shakespeare’s dutifulness: “[I]n compliance with the taste of the age in which he lived, he inserted some things which ought to be wholly omitted, and others which might be rendered unexceptionable by a very little alteration” (FS 1807, vi). This idea that Shakespeare’s vulgarity is simply a function of his historical embeddedness was one shared by many commentators on the dramatist and his works. For corroborating testimony Bowdler refers to observations offered “by the author of that elegant essay, in which SHAKESPEARE is vindicated from the illiberal attacks of VOLTAIRE,” and in particular to the argument the reader will find there that, as the author of the Essay writes and Bowdler quotes, “there are delicacies of decorum in one age, unknown to another age; but whatever is immoral, is equally blameable in all ages; and every approach to obscenity is an offense for which wit cannot atone, nor the

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barbarity or the corruption of the times excuse” (FS 1807, vi). Bowdler invokes Elizabeth Montagu’s 1769 book, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare and in part on the strength of Montagu’s apparent corroboration that there is much in Shakespeare that is “immoral”; Bowdler declares “On this principle I have omitted many speeches in which SHAKESPEARE has been tempted ‘to purchase laughter at the price of decency,’ in scenes, for which all the wit of FALSTAFF can furnish no apology; but I trust that nothing is omitted which the reader ought to regret” (FS 1807, vi–vii). Bowdler is careful here to explain that her work on the Shakespeare corpus has been carefully restricted to excision and redaction only; she announces—with a curious blend of pride and humility—that she has not dared to add to Shakespeare’s plays in any way: Twenty of the most unexceptionable of SHAKESPEARE’S Plays are here selected, in which not a single line is added, but from which I have endeavoured to remove every thing that could give just offence to the religious and virtuous mind. (FS 1807, vii)

Regardless of how one feels about Harriet Bowdler’s censorious argument, however, or about her deployment of what turns out in fact to be one very small and generally insubstantial piece of Montagu’s discussions of Shakespeare (which, again, are defensive and—as will be addressed presently—laudatory in nature), Bowdler’s efforts via the mechanics of quotation to make Montagu present in her own Preface to the first edition of the Family Shakespeare enact a series of maneuvers that I want to argue are fundamental to the remediations enacted in the name of Shakespeare. The interpolation of Montagu into Bowdler’s argument is itself the reiteration of one of the strategies of the acts of remediation: the interpolation of a prior authority, but an interpolation that by virtue of careful manipulations—which might take the form of discrete edits, emendations, revision, partial quotation, inversions, and even wholesale rewritings—emerges from the process as an adaptation of the prior text or argument. In this way Bowdler adapts Montagu in order to establish not only the legitimacy of her expurgational project, but also something like a critical genealogy or line of descent that connects Bowdler’s radical editorial practices to the great tradition of editing Shakespeare. In order to establish this genealogy in which her own edition will seem not merely to come after but also to be derived from such legitimate editions as those

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produced by Johnson or Pope or Theobald, among others, Bowdler must deploy certain tactics that aim toward legitimation. But importantly, these efforts to legitimize her editorial project wholly depend upon a fundamental violation of her announced methodology of mere excision and redaction since her Family Shakespeare is underwritten by a grand and determining or definitional interpolation: Bowdler’s own moral sensibility. For it is this addition to Shakespeare’s plays that both defines Bowdler’s edition and at the same time requires the ruthless redactions the expurgated texts manifest. The point here is not that Harriet Bowdler is unique in employing this remedial adaptive strategy, but rather that in enacting her own version of it she is repeating like practices in the work of earlier Shakespeare remediators. An important case in point is in fact Elizabeth Montagu’s Essay (particularly her famous Introduction) in which we can detect a similar strategy, the object of which is the prior editorial work of Alexander Pope.

I For Montagu, it is certainly a matter of plain fact that “in some places” Shakespeare’s works “bear the marks of the unpolished times in which he wrote” (Montagu, 5). The “cause” of this, once again, is the quality of the times in which Shakespeare lived—“a time when learning was tinctured with pedantry; wit was unpolished, and mirth ill-bred.” Montagu continues her contextual account of Shakespeare’s errors: The court of Elizabeth spoke a scientific jargon, and a certain obscurity of style was universally affected. James brought an addition of pedantry, accompanied by indecent and indelicate manners and language. By contagion, or from complaisance to the taste of the public, Shakespeare falls sometimes into the fashionable mode of writing: but this is only by fits; for many parts of all his plays are written with the most noble, elegant, and uncorrupted simplicity. (Montagu, 10)

Montagu identifies as well a second cause of the occasional weakness (or failings) in Shakespeare’s plays: his absolute originality, which is itself the very hallmark of genius.5 Where other—that is, lesser—dramatists were content to remain confined by the protocols of established rules of art (such as those attributed with such durability to Aristotle), Shakespeare instead was able to leap over and beyond the traditional and the expected:

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Great indulgence is due to the errors of original writers, who, quitting the beaten track which other have travelled, make daring incursions into unexplored regions of invention, and boldly strike into the pathless sublime: it is no wonder if they are often bewildered, sometimes benighted; yet surely it is more eligible to partake the pleasure and the toil of their adventures, than to follow the cautious steps of timid imitators through trite and common roads. Genius is of a bold enterprizing nature, ill adapted to the formals restraints of critic institutions, or indeed to lay down to itself rules of nice discretion. (Montagu, 8)

In defending Shakespeare against accusations of the failure to abide by the traditional aesthetic rules that constrained other dramatists, Montagu invokes Alexander Pope, who said (as Montagu has it) that to form a judgment of Shakespeare’s works, we are not to apply to the rules of Aristotle, which would be like trying a man by the laws of one country, who lived under those of another.—Heaven-born genius acts from something superior to rules, and antecedent to rules; and has a right of appeal to nature herself. (Montagu, 7)

This passage offers a close paraphrase of language from Pope’s Preface to his edition of The Works of Shakespeare (London, 1725). But there is something curious at work in Montagu’s invocation and paraphrase of Pope as Shakespeare’s editor. Pope’s line reads thus, “To judge therefore of Shakespeare by Aristotle’s rules is like trying a man by the Laws of one Country who acted under those of another.”6 In Montagu’s version, this line as paraphrased leads onto a second, separated by a dash: “Heaven-born genius acts from something superior to rules, and antecedent to rules; and has a right of appeal to nature herself.” It is worth highlighting the fact that this second line, in which Montagu invokes not only the idea of genius but also the heavily freighted notion that such genius is “heaven-born,” is not Pope’s at all, even though this might appear on first glance to be precisely the case. But perhaps Montagu’s dash suffices to set off Pope’s language from her own. In any event, this blurring of the language of two different critics signals something more than Montagu’s intent to underscore (or perhaps to complete) Pope’s argument concerning the irrelevance of Aristotelian protocols and rules when the subject in question is Shakespeare. Indeed, what I would consider Montagu’s remediation—through supplementation—of Pope’s disqualification of Aristotle as the proper measure of Shakespeare’s success as a dramatist functions to direct consideration of

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Shakespeare and his defects (to use Pope’s word) away from the strictly historical account of the general vulgarity of Elizabethan and Jacobean culture toward a more abstract and, we might say, theoretical understanding. And the end product of this redirection amounts to the reverential mystification of Shakespeare’s genius that is so conspicuous in Montagu’s book. This maneuver perhaps comes into sharper focus if we contrast Montagu’s mystification of Shakespeare’s genius with Pope’s more prosaic and historical account. Immediately after the sentence quoted above, Pope credits Shakespeare’s exilic ignorance of Aristotelian rules first to the very nature of the audiences for which Shakespeare wrote (“He writ to the People; and writ at first without patronage from the better sort”) and then to a more general literary ignorance. Shakespeare wrote, Pope argues, without the assistance or advice from the Learned, as without the advantage of education or acquaintance among them; without that knowledge of the best models, the Ancients, to inspire him with an emulation of them; in a word, without any views of Reputation, and of what Poets are pleas’d to call Immortality: some or all of which have encourag’d the vanity or animated the ambition of other writers. (Pope, vii)

For Pope, it is only once Shakespeare does come to the protective and productive notice of the court (“when the encouragement of the Court had succeeded to that of the Town”) that “the works of his riper years are raised above those of his former.” These later plays, Pope argues, prove that “his productions improved in proportion to the respect he had for his auditors” (Pope, vii). As a second contributing cause that serves to explain (or explain away) Shakespeare’s defects, Pope points to the dramatist’s having been a player and “forming himself first upon the judgments of that body of men whereof he was a member.” With this identity in mind, it becomes clear that Shakespeare, not unlike any player of his day, would have been wholly concerned with the demands posed by the theater as commercial venture and the pursuit of this primary concern would mean he and the other the players would have known “no rule but that of pleasing the present humour and complying with the wit in fashion” (Pope, vii). Pope concludes, And in this view it will be but fair to allow that most of our Author’s faults are less to be ascribed to his wrong judgment as a Poet than to his right judgment as a Player. (Pope, viii)

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Montagu’s turn toward mystification is signaled by the invocation of “heaven-born genius” and functions as a pivot point in her representation of Shakespeare in her Essay, even as the dash functions both to elide Pope’s words with her own and at the same time to shift from history to mystery. This turn toward “genius” constitutes Montagu’s shift from the work of historicizing to the altogether different work of praise. It also forms part of the “canonization” of writers such as Shakespeare and Cervantes addressed by Roger Chartier (as discussed in the previous chapter) that “turned their works into monuments.”7 For Montagu, Voltaire’s criticisms of Shakespeare are not only out of step with all true critics since Shakespeare’s time to the present moment (“there has not been a great poet, or great critic, since his time, who has not spoken of him with the highest veneration” [Montagu, 10–11]), but they also betray Voltaire’s own limitations and ignorance. “It is certain,” she writes, that Voltaire “could not enter into his meaning.” She continues: He comprehended enough to perceive he [Shakespeare] was unobservant of some established rules of composition; the felicity with which he performs what no rules can teach escapes him. (Montagu, 11)

Voltaire misjudges Shakespeare because Voltaire is so blinded by adherence to “rules of composition” that he literally cannot see any productive variation from them. Moreover, Voltaire fails to perceive what we might call an alternative design at work in Shakespeare’s plays, the precise nature of which remains utterly lost on Voltaire and at the same time constitutes the inaccessible greatness—or, genius —of Shakespeare and his works: Will not an intelligent spectator admire the prodigious structures of StoneHenge, because he does not know by what law of mechanics they were raised? Like them, our author’s works will remain for ever the greatest monuments of the amazing force of nature, which we ought to view as we do other prodigies, with an attention to, and admiration of their stupendous parts, and proud irregularity of greatness. (Montagu, 11)

Even having offered this assessment of the essentially unknowable causes of Shakespeare’s genius, Montagu will propose certain “criteria [that] must be established by which we may determine his merits” (Montagu, 12). In order to determine these criteria, Montagu reminds her readers to keep in mind “what is proposed to be done by the means of dramatic imitation.”

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And what precisely she herself has in mind here is the ability of the dramatic imitation in “effecting certain moral purposes.” The moral quality of dramatic imitation is a self-evident category for Montagu (as indeed it would be for Harriett Bowdler) and is based upon an understanding of the particular pleasures afforded by different poetic forms or genres according to their innate powers to please and instruct; when we look to poetry for beauty and for instruction we look for it to have “invention, spirit, elegance, and such perfections as are necessary to recommend any sort of poetry, but we also require that each should have its specific merit; the ode, that which constitutes the perfection of an ode” (Montagu, 12). In terms of Shakespeare, Montagu is explicit: do his plays (which she identifies as “fables”) “answer the noblest end of fable, moral instruction” (Montagu, 13)? The second of her two criteria is less self-evident as a rubric with an objective metric: “whether his dramatic imitation has its proper dramatic excellence” (Montagu, 13). Part of the challenge of this second criteria is that it cannot avail itself of an absolute; any determinations of this question must necessarily be comparativist: “It is idle to refer to a vague, unrealized idea of perfection: we may safely pronounce that to be well executed, in any art, which after the repeated efforts of great geniuses is equal to any thing that has been produced” (Montagu, 13). Perhaps predictably, Montagu’s point of reference for greatness in dramatic imitation is the body of dramatic works left us by the Greeks. Noting that such a reliance on historical precedent is itself a time-honored tradition, Montagu argues that we may “securely applaud what the ancients have crowned [and] therefore should not withhold our approbation wherever we find our countryman has equalled the most admired passages in the Greek tragedians” (Montagu, 13). But the challenge that this comparativist methodology poses is the array of profound distinctions that obtain between Shakespeare and his moment, on the one hand, and ancient Greece and her dramatists, on the other. While Shakespeare plays “were to be acted in a paltry tavern, to an unlettered audience, just emerging from barbarity,” what we would today call the cultural setting of ancient Athens provided an altogether different and favorable circumstance: the Greek tragedies were to be exhibited at the public charge, under the care and auspices of the magistrates of Athens; where the very populace were critics in wit, and connoisseurs in public spectacles. The period when Sophocles and Euripides wrote, was that in which the fine arts, and polite

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literature, were in a degree of perfection which succeeding ages have emulated in vain. (Montagu, 14)

Is there a contradiction here in the argument that says that the Greek tragedians are the proper measure of greatness by which we can evaluate Shakespeare, and the observation just quoted (and repeated elsewhere in Montagu’s book) of something like the historical incommensurability of these two cultures—early modern London and ancient Athens—and hence any comparative evaluation that would by its very nature necessarily be false? Perhaps. The only way out of such a contradiction is if Montagu were somehow able to maintain both the viability of the Shakespeare and ancient dramatist comparison while controlling for historical variability. The way she achieves this, I would argue, is by drawing the fine distinction between seeing the ancient playwrights as models (which would function as a pure metric) and seeing them as examples of greatness. If Sophocles and Euripides are examples of greatness and their works serve to create a setting within which only the greatest of subsequent art can legitimately be located, rather than evaluative models, then what is required is a dislodging of the ancient dramatists from their now traditional status as originals against which all subsequent generations of dramatists will be measured. By detaching Sophocles and Euripides from the untenable burden of standing as originary, Montagu frees them from what can only be seen as a mythical position (thereby returning them to history) and at the same time frees Shakespeare (and all other artists) from the demand to “measure up” to the seemingly transcendent greatness of Greek drama. This maneuver also has the benefit of shifting attention from the true object of Shakespeare’s dramatic imitation, the proper object of which is not the ancient plays, but rather nature itself, a fact more or less completely lost on critics, including Voltaire: For copying nature as he found it in the busy walks of human life, he drew from an original, with which the literati are seldom well acquainted. They perceive his portraits are not of the Grecian or of the Roman school: after finding them unlike to the celebrated forms preserved in learned museums they do not deign to enquire whether they resemble the living persons they were intended to represent. Among these connoisseurs, whose acquaintance with the characters of men is formed in the library, not in the street, the camp, or village, whatever is unpolished and uncouth passes for fantastic and absurd, though, in fact, it is a faithful representation of a really existing character. (Montagu, 17–18)

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This passage makes clear Montagu’s commitment to a number of terms and ideas that are central to this book, including Shakespeare’s relationship to nature (or Nature), the problem of originality, and the tendency to construe Shakespeare’s dramatic characters as real persons. This last point regarding the nature of Shakespeare’s fictional characters as what we might call actual (or “really existing”) characters is not new to Montagu’s book. Indeed, she would have encountered a similar sentiment on conspicuous display in Pope’s Preface, a text that very much informs Montagu and her conception of Shakespeare and his status as genius. Pope argues that Shakespeare’s “Characters are so much nature her self that ’tis a sort of injury to call them by so distant a name as Copies of her.” It is this argument that gives rise to Pope’s famous hyperbole: “[H]ad all the Speeches been printed without the names of the persons I believe one might have apply’d them with certainty to every speaker” (Pope, viii). Pope’s argument about Shakespeare’s characters follows from his understanding of the dramatist’s unique status in the history of art and letters: for Pope, Shakespeare is the original original, the first of his kind: “If ever any Author deserved the name of an Original , it was Shakespeare.” And if it is true, as Pope writes, that “Homer himself drew not his art so immediately from the fountains of Nature,” then Shakespeare’s greater status—his genius, let us say—arises as a function of his unique and original relationship to Nature: “The Poetry of Shakespeare was Inspiration indeed: he is not so much an Imitator as an Instrument of Nature; and ’tis not so just to say that he speaks from her as that she speaks thro’ him” (Pope, iii). For her part, Montagu does not wholly embrace Pope’s celebration of Shakespeare’s characters or, more importantly still, his proximity to Nature that Pope was careful to delineate and to celebrate. Indeed, Montagu will grant Shakespeare the ability to imitate nature to an otherwise unprecedented level of accuracy and power. But for Montagu, the problem is the particular “nature” that Shakespeare chose (or was perhaps forced) to represent: for though our author, from want of delicacy or from a desire to please the popular taste, thought he had done well when he faithfully copied nature, or represented customs, it will appear to politer times the error of an untutored mind; which the example of judicious artists, and the admonitions of delicate connoisseurs had not taught, that only graceful nature and decent customs give proper subjects for imitation. (Montagu, 18)

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For her part in 1807, Harriet Bowdler will embrace and adapt this idea that “graceful nature and decent customs” are the only objects appropriate for dramatic imitation and representation and accordingly will work to purge Shakespeare’s plays of any violations of proper decorum. The fact that Bowdler’s sense of what constitutes decorum is an early nineteenth-century construct—and therefore perfectly alien to Shakespeare’s early modern moment—is either entirely lost on Bowdler or altogether suppressed.

II While the specter of Montagu lingers over Harriet Bowdler’s efforts, this haunting becomes rather more explicit subsequently as later editions of the Family Shakespeare were in fact dedicated to Montagu and her Shakespeare work: “To the memory of Elizabeth Montagu, author of the Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare … this work is inscribed, by sincere and respectful friendship.”8 These later editions, beginning in 1818, were published by Harriet Bowdler’s brother, Thomas; Harriet’s name would not appear on any of the many subsequent editions of the Family Shakespeare throughout the remaining decades of the nineteenth century. It is important to highlight some of the ways in which Thomas Bowdler’s editions of expurgated Shakespeare will reiterate, in altered form (as is only appropriate) many of the same remedial strategies we saw at work in Harriet’s edition of 1807 and in Montagu’s Essay, as well. Thomas Bowdler’s succeeding editions of the Family Shakespeare offer expanded paratextual material, including a pair of epigraphs that by the fourth edition (of 1825) appear in the text, one before the title page and one after the dedication to Montagu. The first: Sportive Fancy round him flew, Nature led him by the hand, Instructed him in all she knew, And gave him absolute command.

And the second: Sweetest Bard that ever sung, Nature’s Glory, Fancy’s Child; Never sure did Poet’s tongue Warble forth such wood-notes wild.9

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Neither of these passages is identified or ascribed to any particular author and therefore perhaps give the impression that they are not exactly merely assertions offered by one poet about the status and nature of another, but rather more like free-standing objects in and of themselves that attest to Shakespeare’s greatness: they are voices outside of time. They function in fact like monuments in this regard, marking both a place and a legacy for Shakespeare, cast in the voice of subtle lamentation. But because they are verses, they were of course crafted by a poet (whatever one thinks about their quality as poetry): they are stanzas from David Garrick’s “Ode Upon Dedicating a Building, and Erecting a Statue, to Shakespeare, at Stratford Upon Avon,” written and elaborately performed by Garrick for his famous Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769 (the same year that saw the publication of Montagu’s Essay). Given the context of the Jubilee and especially Garrick’s elaborate efforts to memorialize Shakespeare and, indeed, to offer to monumentalize him—not only in the building dedicated at the Jubilee but also in the Shakespeare statue itself—it is appropriate to the aims of Bowdler’s corresponding efforts to rebuild Shakespeare’s monument, as it were, in the spirit of decorum and purity.10 Both projects—the Jubilee and Garrick’s “Ode,” on the one hand, and Thomas Bowdler’s expanded edition/s of the Family Shakespeare—are examples of remediation undertaken in Shakespeare’s name. But there is something more, here, that runs parallel to Montagu’s appropriation of moments from Pope’s Preface—appropriation that takes the form of quotation and a subsequent adaptation of the quoted passage (in Montagu’s case effected through the supplement)—that again has to do with the nature of remediation itself: not only does Bowdler quote Garrick without attribution, he also revises, or adapts, Garrick in subtle but important ways. The first quotation alters the locational specificity provided in Garrick’s poem, in which it is essential that Stratford, the Avon, and its natural surroundings are celebrated not only as site, but also as part of the force that is infused into the young Shakespeare. Addressing the very citizens of Stratford who can claim a nearly hereditary closeness and, perhaps, even ownership of the “blest genius of the isle,” Garrick asks the key question: Do not your sympathetic hearts accord. To own the ‘bosom lord?’ ’Tis he! ’tis he!—that demi-god! Who Avon’s flowr’y margin trod,

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While sportive Fancy round him flew, Where Nature led him by the hand, Instructed him in all she knew, And gave him absolute command! ’Tis he! ’tis he! ‘The god of our idolatry!’11

Bowdler’s abstraction of the lines from this stanza that he offers in the form of a monument to Shakespeare in his expurgated edition has the effect of abstracting Shakespeare-as-genius from the ancient and informing idea of genius as the god of place—the “tutelary deity” Jonathan Bate discusses in terms of the “analogy with the spirit of a place [that] strengthened the association … where the artful poet draws his knowledge from books, the genius goes to a natural source—the Castilian spring, the banks of Avon” (Bate, 162). The second quotation is altered in a different manner: it is bowdlerized. Where Bowdler has “Never sure did Poet’s tongue/ Warble forth such wood-notes wild” Garrick’s version (since it cannot be called ‘original,’ as will be discussed presently) has “Never sure did witching tongue/ Warble forth such wood-notes wild” (Garrick, 3). This is as clear an example of the practice of Bowdler’s expurgational strategy as we might require in order to understand the nature of his endeavor. “Witching” clearly had too many negative connotations and connections to witchcraft and the occult more generally to be allowed to stand, especially in lines celebrating Shakespeare. Bowdler makes the apparently easy substitution (one of his principal editing/purifying strategies) and replaces “witching” with “Poet’s.” As far as Bowdler’s logic goes, this is a reasonable substitution: it keeps a focus on poets and poetry and has at least the virtue of maintaining the meter of the line. But it does not do entire justice to Garrick’s line as he wrote it—or to Garrick’s understanding of the be-witching power of Shakespeare’s lines and his plays. By effectively blocking off what (for lack of a better word) I might call the spiritual dimension of Garrick’s notion of Shakespeare’s genius as supernatural, Bowdler effectively blunts the move in the ode toward enshrining Shakespeare as that “demi-god” and (in a quoted passage) the “god of our idolatry.” Our initial exposure to Bowdler’s expanded edition of the Family Shakespeare presents us, then, with the curious experience of the appropriated stanzas that mark out broadly the terms of Bowdler’s conception of Shakespeare—a conception of natural genius that is not sufficiently sacrosanct,

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however, to prevent the kind of redaction that the purifying urge requires, even when such purification (so-called) takes place in the quoted stanzas themselves. But this entire dynamic—unattributed quotation, appropriation, and adaptation—is also on display in the ode from which Bowdler has adapted the epigraphs for his expurgated Shakespeare. Even though Garrick’s “Ode” will trade on what by 1769 were a number of the more or less standard tropes employed in the praise of Shakespeare (especially the idea of “sweetness” or the praise of Shakespeare’s “wit,” and claims of “immortality” among others), there are moments in which the poem appropriates the language of other poets, frequently in revised or adapted form, to further the monumentalizing imperative of the “Ode.” At times this other poet is Shakespeare himself: we hear of Shakespeare’s own “muse of fire” (Garrick, 5), for instance, or at the end of the poem we are told “We ne’er shall look upon his like again!” (Garrick, 15). At other times, the other poet is Milton, whose L’Allegro gives us the formulation that Bowdler offers in his second epitaph. Milton’s line reads12 Then to the well-trod stage anon, If Jonson’s learnèd sock be on, Or sweetest Shakespeare fancy’s child Warble his native wood-notes wild….

And again, Garrick’s adaptation reads thus: Sweetest bard that ever sung, Nature’s glory, Fancy’s Child; Never sure did witching one Warble forth such wood-notes wild.

It is a striking fact of Garrick’s ode meant (at least in part) to celebrate the unprecedented nature—the originality—of Shakespeare’s genius that it should itself fall back upon what we might consider the poetics of remediation and thereby praise originality in an unoriginal way—in the voice, let us say, of an echo of still earlier (and more original) poetry of praise. In related fashion, when he takes over from his sister the project of publishing expurgated remediations of Shakespeare, Thomas Bowdler gestures toward something like originality when he identifies his expanded 1818 text as the “First Edition” of the Family Shakespeare. In this work Bowdler offers a Preface in which he makes a striking—and for the present

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book a strikingly apposite—argument of justification for the actions he will undertake to judge, expurgate, excise, purify, revise, adapt, augment, or otherwise remediate Shakespeare’s plays. And while these efforts have earned Bowdler a posthumous reputation that no one would envy (least of all a textual editor), the argument he offers in order to legitimate his project is not without significant interest, especially within the context that this book seeks to understand when we consider the range of remediations undertaken in Shakespeare’s name. Bowdler begins the Preface to his First Edition is striking fashion by invoking first two great masterworks from the history of painting and sculpture (one early modern and one ancient) and second, an egregious and notorious act of art desecration: If a presumptuous artist should undertake to remove a supposed defect in the Transfiguration of Raphael, or in the Belvedere Apollo, and in making the attempt should injure one of these invaluable productions of art and genius, I should consider his name as deserving never to be mentioned, or mentioned only with him who set fire to the Temple of Diana. But the works of the poet may be considered in a very different light from those of painter and the statuary. Shakespeare, inimitable Shakespeare, will remain the subject of admiration as long as taste and literature shall exist, and his writings will be handed down to posterity in their native beauty, although the present attempt to add to his fame should prove entirely abortive. (FS 1818, vii)

Perhaps most commentators on Bowdler’s Shakespeare efforts would indeed be pleased to place him precisely in the company of Herostratus, whose destruction of the Temple of Artemis (Bowdler’s “Diana”) has served to enshrine him firmly in the gallery of self-serving, fame-seeking historical villains, even as Bowdler’s expurgations have earned him a lasting reputation as a mutilator of poetic and dramatic art. But apart from this irony, it is striking that Raphael’s Transfiguration of Christ should make an appearance in Bowdler’s Preface; as is the case with the reference to the Belvedere Apollo, Raphael’s great painting is offered not only as an instance of an artistic masterpiece, but as one that could not be imagined to endure the intervention of any “presumptuous artist” whose aim, as Bowdler makes clear—and as parallels his own as an editor, of course—would be “to remove a supposed defect” in the work of art. The irony here is that while Bowdler positions the Transfiguration as whole and complete in itself (though still theoretically vulnerable to destructive interventions), the painting in fact was left unfinished at Raphael’s death in 1520. The subse-

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quent completion of what is, strictly speaking, a collaboratively produced masterpiece was done perhaps by several hands—by students in Raphael’s studio. Many art historians in fact actually assign the principal role in the completion of the painting to Giulio Romano, the celebrated artist known to (art) history for his paintings, especially his trompe l’oeil masterworks (such as those in Mantua’s Palazzo del Te), and known to Shakespeareans as the sculptor said (by Paulina) to be responsible for the lifelike statue of Hermione in the fifth act of The Winter’s Tale.13 Bowdler’s second masterpiece is equally interesting in part due to its status as perhaps the most celebrated piece of sculpture from antiquity, but also because the Belvedere Apollo, so famous and so important to the history of art, is itself a Roman copy of a now-lost Greek original, perhaps by fourth century BCE Athenian sculptor Leochares. The further irony posed by this invocation of the presumably unique masterwork of art that is in point of fact well known as a copy of some other original—or, indeed, because the Belvedere Apollo is a marble statue and the original Greek sculpture is believed to have been a bronze, we can consider the Belvedere remediation across artistic genres of a lost original—becomes even clearer when we read Bowdler’s explanation of the differences that obtain, as he sees it, between the “presumptuous artist” whose corrections to the Transfiguration or the Apollo Belvedere may well be disastrous, and his own justifiable acts of what in its broadest sense we can call remediation articulated through redaction: Here, then, is the difference. If the endeavour to improve the picture or the statue should be unsuccessful, the beauty of the original would be destroyed, and the injury irreparable. In such a case, let the artist refrain from using the chisel or the pencil: but with the works of the poet no such danger occurs, and the critic need not be afraid of employing his pen; for the original will continue unimpaired, although his own labours should immediately be consigned to oblivion. (FS 1818, vii–viii)

Bowdler’s particular exculpatory point of departure strikes me as a presciently modern one, marking as it does the distinction between what we have to call unique or, in a special sense of the word, original works of art, on the one hand, from works of art that can be said to exist only in copies, no one of which can ever lay claim to something like absolute authenticity or authority, on the other.

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But after this good start, as it were, and in an argument about Shakespeare’s failings that echoes similar sentiments we have seen at play in Montagu and in Pope before her, Bowdler takes the fatal turn toward redaction. In spite of Shakespeare’s status as “the first of dramatic writers,” Bowdler writes almost in the tone of regret, “it must, however, be acknowledged, by his warmest admirers, that some defects are to be found in the writings of our immortal bard” (FS 1818, viii). Bowdler has read his Shakespeare and has found that the language “is not always faultless” and moreover that “[m]any words and expressions occur which are of so indecent a nature as to render it highly desirable that they should be erased.” Of these, Bowdler writes, “the greater part are evidently introduced to gratify the taste of the age in which he lived, and the rest may be ascribed to his own unbridled fancy.” But neither can stand, as Bowdler quickly warms to the task he feels called upon to execute: But neither the vicious taste of the age, nor the most brilliant effusions of wit, can afford an excuse for profaneness or obscenity; and if these could be obliterated, the transcendent genius of the poet would undoubtedly shine with more lustre. To banish every thing of this nature from the writings of Shakespeare is the object of the present undertaking. My earnest wish is to render his plays unsullied by any scene, by any speech, or, if possible, by any word that can give pain to the most chaste, or offence to the most religious of his readers. (FS 1818, viii)

Near the close of this Preface, Bowdler explains his method in more detail, always insistent that his work entails cutting but not adding to Shakespeare’s works: “though many erasures have for this purpose been made,” we are told, “the reader may be assured that not a single line, nor even half of a line, has, in any one instance, been added to the original text.” But the more Bowdler says about his judicious method, the less sure the reader may feel: I know the force of Shakespeare, and the weakness of my own pen, too well, to think of attempting the smallest interpolation. In a few, but in very few instances, one or two words (at the most three) have been inserted to connect the sense of what follows the passage that is expunged with that which precedes it. The few words which are thus added, are connecting particles, words of little moment, and in no degree affecting the meaning of the author, or the story of the play. A word that is less objectionable is sometimes substituted for a synonymous word that is improper. (FS 1818, x–xi)

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The Family Shakespeare proved to be an edition of wide popular appeal, as its nearly two dozen editions by the end of the nineteenth century demonstrate. Bowder’s Preface to the fourth edition (1825) is interesting both as a record of his continued commitment to his vision of a purified Shakespeare and as a marker of a growing stridency in the defense of his project; it at the same time provides a platform for Bowdler’s extension of his efforts to legitimize his project by attesting to (and mustering external support for) what he considers the actual increase in the beauty of Shakespeare’s works made possible by means of expurgational redaction. For the former, Bowdler writes that the criticisms that had been levied against earlier edition of the Family Shakespeare arose only from those readers who “condemn every attempt at removing indecency from Shakespeare” (FS 1825, vii). Undeterred, however, Bowdler presses on. Not even the fact that “no person appears to have detected any indecent expression” in his edition can convince him that he has gone far enough and achieved his goal: “but this has not made me less solicitous to direct my own attention to that object, and to endeavour to render this work as unobjectionable as possible.” Bowdler rededicates himself, having taken “great pains to discover and correct any defects which might formerly have escaped my notice.” And now, seemingly satisfied with his efforts, he can “assure the parents and guardians of youth, that they may read the FAMILY SHAKESPEARE aloud in the mixed society of young persons of both sexes, sans peur et sans reproche” (FS 1825, viii). As for his increasingly strident declarations of the effects of his efforts on the plays themselves, by the time he reached the fourth edition Bowdler had become convinced that not only was his Family Shakespeare doing no real harm to Shakespeare, but it was actually improving the plays. He easily dismisses objections to his editorial work, arguing that any criticisms of the work came only from readers and not theater-goers—“those persons who have confined their study of Shakespeare to the closet, and have not learned in the theatre, with how much safety it is possible to make the necessary alterations.” Bowdler then takes the next step dictated by this logic: he could perhaps more easily be understood as a theater impresario rather than a textual editor and such work does not damage the text, as his critics argued: I have attempted to do for the library what the manager does for the stage, and I wish that the persons who urge this objection would examine the plays with attention. I venture to assert, that in the far greater part of them, they

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would find that it is not difficult to separate the indecent from the decent expressions; and they would soon be convinced, that, by removing the stains, they would view the picture not only uninjured, but possessed of additional beauty. (FS 1825, ix–x)

By the logic of Bowdler’s vision and methodology, excision and expurgation do not lead to reduced texts but rather—and paradoxically—to a collection of texts that are more thoroughly and rigorously complete: Shakespeare’s plays can now be offered without the accretions of vulgarity that across the years and across the many editions has managed to bloat and corrupt the corpus offered in the Family Shakespeare for the first time in their proper trim. At this point Bowdler quotes a “very superior judge of poetic composition” who has also argued that the defects in Shakespeare’s works are not only present (“In general,” this quoted author writes, it has “been found easy to extirpate the offensive expressions of our great poet, without any injury to the context, or any visible scar, or blank in composition”) but that they can also easily—and to improved aesthetic effect—be removed, revised or adapted precisely because they are no proper parts of Shakespeare’s work: They turn out, not to be so much cankers in the flowers, as weeds that have sprung up by their side; not flaws in the metal, but impurities that have gathered on its surface, and that, so far from being missed on their removal, the work generally appears more natural and harmonious without them. (quoted in FS 1825, x)

The writer of these lines, as it happens, was not writing about Shakespeare’s works as such, but rather was writing a wholly positive and supportive review of Bowdler’s Family Shakespeare, hardly the disinterested critic the Preface seems to imply. The piece from which Bowdler quotes was published in the Edinburgh Review in October 1821 (which information Bowdler provides in a note) and was authored by Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey, information that Bowdler does not happen to provide.14 Bowdler admits that he would very much like “to prove by examples the perfect justice of the observation,” but runs headlong into a complication. The attempt to provide corroborating evidence to support his contention that material cut from Shakespeare’s plays on the grounds of indecency deserved cutting would itself require something indecent: the explicit identification of those material thus excised. Bowdler cannot print any examples of the

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indecencies he cut from Shakespeare’s plays because of their very indecency. The politics of Bowdler’s expurgational labors, that is, frustrates his desire to illustrate his own handiwork. But Bowdler is a resourceful man and a stratagem offers itself: the language lesson scene in Henry V . It is, surely, the perfect example, since its indecency will be for many readers obscured by the French “mispronunciations,” and because it has—for Bowdler at least—no functional value in the plot of the play. So Bowdler can quote the opening six lines of 3.4 and not feel obliged to offer any more: “I will not tire my readers with a longer extract from this uninteresting dialogue.” Bowdler objects of course to the sounding of “the two most indecent words in the French language” and feels on this score more than justified to expunge the entire scene: Is it possible that any person will feel regret at perceiving that, in the Family Shakespeare, the beautiful play of Henry V is not interrupted in a very interesting part of the narrative, by so improper a scene—by a scene so totally unconnected with every thing which precedes or follows after it, that if it were taken by itself, no reader would be able to discover in what act it was meant to be inserted? (FS 1825, xi–xii)

This idea of the inorganic nature of indecencies such as this entire scene represents suggests to Bowdler that perhaps most such instances represent what he will call “interpolations” into Shakespeare’s plays. “The objectionable parts,” he writes, are so completely unconnected with the play, that one might almost be inclined to suppose, that Shakespeare, in the first instance, composed one of his beautiful dramas, and after it was finished, was compelled, by the wretched taste of the age, to add something of a low and ludicrous nature. (FS 1825, xiii)

The status of these additions (“The passages thus inserted, have really, in many cases, the appearance of interpolations”) secures for Bowdler their suitability for redaction: they are indeed the “weeds” that Jeffrey’s review suggested they were, “sprung up by the side of the flowers,” and the moral work of this editor to remove them not only accomplishes the desired purification of the texts, but moreover will allow those texts/flowers to “appear with additional beauty” (FS 1825, xiii). Bowdler’s work thereby becomes an act of restoration, albeit one that requires the removal of Shakespearean material from the plays so that they might be more truly and beautifully

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Shakespeare. That this work also entails at many moments substitutions of words and phrases that are Bowdler’s and not Shakespeare’s is simply understood as the cost of the restorative labors that produce the Family Shakespeare.15 Bowdler’s account of the indecencies in Shakespeare posits an initial perfection of the plays that is then reduced, rather than enhanced, by Shakespeare’s vulgar interpolations. The plays as we have them before Bowdler’s work, in other words, already represent revised, altered, adapted, or remediated versions that are on the whole poorer versions than the originals themselves. Shakespeare thus stands as both the original and the corrupting reviser of his own works. He becomes, that is, an instance of that “presumptuous artist” Bowdler’s earlier Preface had warned of, who illadvisedly dares to tamper with masterworks of art and as a result has left them in a debased and ruined form. Shakespeare as Herostratus. Bowdler’s own efforts, then, are offered as artistic restorations dedicated to returning to the world the glorious plays in their original forms, before Shakespeare could deface them with indecencies and vulgarities. What is at stake in Bowdler’s project is the very idea of the original masterwork imagined to exist in some pure state behind—or, perhaps, prior to—any textual iterations, including even their first printings (and their first stagings as plays). By this definition, Shakespeare’s originals are always already lost: unavailable to any textual representation since all such representations—until Bowdler’s—are actually copies of the corrupted adaptations Shakespeare wrote in obedience to the “wretched taste of the age.” What we have, then, is the curious situation in which Bowdler, nearly two centuries after Shakespeare’s death, is himself fashioning the original Shakespeare plays that have always been lost—always, that is, until Bowdler “composes” the Family Shakespeare. Evidently immune to the taste of his own (or perhaps any) age, Bowdler is, finally, more thoroughly and more honestly Shakespearean than was Shakespeare himself. And what has become of the “presumptuous artist” Bowdler had warned us of, whose interventions—remediations—serve to disfigure and thereby ruin the work of art? For Bowdler, who has become “Shakespeare himself,” that presumptuous artist is none other than Shakespeare, whose belated interpolations of vulgarity into his otherwise pure texts has resulted in their degradation. Bowdler looks into Shakespeare and sees himself staring back.

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III If it is the case, as I have just suggested, that Thomas Bowdler sees himself as the authentic Shakespeare, then the Family Shakespeare, in its many editions and with its ever-expanding paratextual labors, stands as something of a self-portrait. But suggesting as much immediately raises a series of questions having to do with the status of originality and—particularly when the subject is Shakespeare—with the nature of genius, two traits or characteristics that historically we have been in the habit of attributing to Shakespeare. And, as we saw was the case with Alexander Pope, Shakespeare was in fact offered as the original original—as the starting point, as it were, of originality itself. It is little wonder then that Shakespeare’s works should be the site toward which our many fantasies of originality should gravitate. For his part, Thomas Bowdler articulates just this gravitational pull toward the Shakespeare’s works as a defining point of origin. In his Preface to the 1818 edition of the Family Shakespeare, Bowdler offers a recollection that is dense with both generational information and fantasy: I can hardly imagine a more pleasing occupation for a winter’s evening in the country, than for a father to read one of Shakespeare’s plays to his family circle. My object is to enable him to do so without incurring the danger of falling unawares among words and expressions which are of such a nature as to raise a blush on the cheek of modesty, or render it necessary for the reader to pause, and examine the sequel, before he proceeds further in the entertainment of the evening. (FS 1818, x)

In his 1825 4th edition, this passage is footnoted; when one turns to the accompanying note, one finds an extended recollection of Bowdler’s that recreates the scene of a father’s reading: no longer an imagined or projected scene of paternal domestic harmony, the scene emerges from Bowdler’s memory as both historical and generative: My first idea of the FAMILY SHAKESPEARE arose from the recollection of my father’s custom of reading in this manner to his family. Shakespeare (with whom no person was better acquainted) was a frequent subject of the evening entertainment. In the perfection of reading few men were equal to my father; and such was his good taste, his delicacy, and his prompt discretion, that his family listened with delight to Lear, Hamlet, and Othello, without knowing that those matchless tragedies contained words and expressions improper to

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be pronounced; and without having reason to suspect that any parts of the plays had been omitted by the circumspect and judicious reader. It afterwards occurred to me, that what my father did so readily and successfully for his family, my inferior abilities might, with the assistance of time and mature consideration, be able to accomplish for the benefit of the public. I say, therefore, that if ‘The Family Shakespeare’ is entitled to any merit, it originates with my father. (FS 1825, xviii)

Among the many striking features of this recollection, which functions both as historical precedent or impetus to Bowdler’s expurgation of Shakespeare’s plays and the desired future scene of reading by other fathers reading purified Shakespeare to their families, we find a defining principle by which Shakespeare’s plays will come to function as both the source of remediations and adaptations and as their projected destinations. And at the same time, Shakespeare will come to serve not only as the occasion for our remediations—redactions and adaptations such as those Bowdler will execute—but also as the site for our own mediations: of our pasts and of our presents and of our imagined or hoped-for futures. * * * Bowdler’s principal concern and editorial motivation was, in some important ways, tied to the memory of his own father (and at the same time a certain figuring of Shakespeare as a literary father of sorts), and this father functioned as the crucial figure whose judicious presence and refined literary taste served to anchor the Family Shakespeare at the very heart of the scene of domestic reading. We see something of a rejoinder to this fantasy in another and greater Shakespeare remediation (also published for the first time in 1807), Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. For the Lambs, the focus shifts dramatically from Bowdler’s recollected or imagined scene of fatherly reading (which bears the traces of the performative nature of theatrical plays) to the constructed figure of the child reader who resides at the heart of the Lambs’ remediative project. As will be discussed in the following chapter, for the Lambs and their work with Shakespeare, the point of departure is Charles Lamb’s anti-theatricalism. The prose retellings that the Lambs will offer remove the stage altogether and in its place establish the solitary figure of the reading child, detached from the public space of the theater and insulated from its commotions and distractions and dangers. As such, this solitary child, equipped with Tales

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from Shakespeare, becomes the ideal—and idealized—object of an educative project, for Shakespeare’s works provide (as the Lambs will write in the Preface to their Tales ), “a lesson of all sweet and honourable thoughts and actions.”16 So successful was this project to establish the child reader of Shakespeare—or, more accurately, of remediations of Shakespeare—that the Lambs’ Tales establishes a tradition of Shakespeare for children that grows in significance and importance throughout the nineteenth century.

Notes 1. Elizabeth Montagu, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear, Compared with the Greek and French Dramatic Poets, with Some Remarks Upon the Misrepresentations of Mons. de Voltaire (London, 1769). 2. The following discussion of an edition now held in nearly universal contempt should not itself surprise; as Margaret Jane Kidnie has written, “A text—any text—is just another in a long string of texts by which an idea of the (necessarily unfinished) work endlessly comes into being.” Kidnie considers the “notorious” Bowdler edition: “Bowdler’s purged edition, to take a notorious example, is no more or less a text of Shakespeare’s plays than is the First Folio—both are temporally located events in the work’s series” (Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation [Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2009], 25). Among other recent critical considerations of the Family Shakespeare, see Erica Hateley, Shakespeare in Children’s Literature: Gender and Cultural Capital (New York and London: Routledge, 2009); Naomi J. Miller, “Play’s the Thing: Agency in Children’s Shakespeares,” in Shakespeare and Childhood, eds. Kate Chedgzoy, Susanne Greenhalgh, and Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 137–52—and see also Susanne Greenhalgh’s essay in the same volume, “Introduction: Reinventing Shakespearean Childhoods” (117–36); Georgianna Ziegler, “Alice Reads Shakespeare: Charles Dodgson and the Girl’s Shakespeare Project,” in Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults, ed. Naomi J. Miller (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 107–19; and Michael Dobson, “Bowdler and Britannia: Shakespeare and the National Libido,” Shakespeare Survey 46 (1994), 137–44. 3. For bibliographical information on the various editions of the Family Shakespeare, see Noel Perrin, Dr. Bowdler’s Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England and America (New York: Atheneum, 1969; rpt., Boston: Nonpareil, 1992), especially Chapters 3 and 4. See also Andrew Murphy’s discussion of nineteenth-century popular editions in Shakespeare in Print: A

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

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History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 167–87, esp. 169–71. Henrietta Bowdler, The Family Shakespeare (Bath, 1807), v, hereafter cited as (FS 1807, and page number/s). For an important study of Shakespeare and genius, see Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (London: Picador, 1997). The Works of Shakespear, ed. Alexander Pope (London, 1725), vi. Roger Chartier, Cardenio Between Cervantes and Shakespeare: The Story of a Lost Play, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 181. The Family Shakespeare, ed. Thomas Bowdler (London, 1818), A3, hereafter cited as (FS 1818, and page number). Thomas Bowdler, The Family Shakespeare, 4th ed. (London, 1825), n.p., hereafter cited as (FS 1825, and page number/s). For an indispensible discussion of Garrick and the Stratford Jubilee, see Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). David Garrick, “Ode Upon Dedicating a Building, and Erecting a Statue, to Shakespeare, at Stratford upon Avon,” (London, 1769), 1. Milton, L’Allegro (ll. 131–34) in John Milton: The Major Works, eds. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 25. For a discussion of Giulio Romano and The Winter’s Tale, see Howard Marchitello, The Machine in the Text: Science and Literature in the Age of Shakespeare and Galileo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 154–84. For a useful biographical sketch of Lord Jeffrey, especially his work for the Edinburgh Review, see the DNB entry: Michael Fry, ‘Jeffrey, Francis, Lord Jeffrey (1773–1850)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), Online Edition (http://www.oxforddnb.com. proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/view/article/14698. Accessed 28 September 2013). In 1823 Bowdler had published a longer response to his critics in a pamphlet entitled A Letter to the Editor of the British Critic; Occasioned by the Censure Pronounced in that Work on “ Johnson, Pope, Bowdler, Warburton, Theobald, Steevens, Reed, Malone…. (London: 1823). As an instance of Bowdler’s sometimes confused logic—and practice—consider the concluding sentences in his defense of Johnson (“that great literary Colossus” [10]): Those writings possess a distinguished place in the British library, and will render the name of the author an object of veneration to posterity, when the works of him, who has brought forward the ‘Rambler’ as the worst of the assassins, will be consigned to oblivion. I make no apology to the public for this digression; I am persuaded that it will be pardoned.

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‘I cannot but remember such things were, and were much honoured by me.’ (10–11)

Bowdler closes his praise of Johnson with a silently augmented quotation from Macbeth; Macduff’s reaction to the news of the slaughter of his family indeed ruminates on “such things [as] were,” but it’s Bowdler’s addition that is in fact interpolated into the line not wholly from Shakespeare. Bowdler frequently adopts a strident tone in response to the criticisms levied in the British Critic review, as he does quite memorably in the defense of one particular cluster of expurgations of “four short speeches which are addressed by Hamlet to Ophelia, when he throws himself at her feet” (15). Not content with this mere reference to passages he finds obscene (in this play and in As You Like It ), Bowdler presses on: And shall I be classed with the assassins of Caesar, because I have rendered these invaluable plays fit for the perusal of our virtuous females? The Critic may, perhaps, endeavor to excuse himself, by saying that the insertion of a letter alters the spelling, and renders one of those speeches innocent; but I call on him to lay his hand on his heart, and declare, whether he believes that Hamlet in that speech alludes to rural occupations, to the concerns of his native land, or to what is not to be named? (15–16)

16. Charles and Mary Lamb, Tales from Shakespeare, in The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 3 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons; London: Methuen & Co., 1903; rpt., New York: AMS Press, 1968), 3: 2.

CHAPTER 4

Retelling

Charles Lamb opens his 1811 essay “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare,” published in Leigh Hunt’s paper The Reflector, by retelling the story of a recent visit to Westminster Abbey.1 “Taking a turn the other day in the Abbey,” Lamb begins, “I was struck with the affected attitude of a figure, which I do not remember to have seen before” (“Tragedies,” 97). Lamb pauses and examines the figure more carefully: “upon examination [it] proved to be a whole-length of the celebrated Mr. Garrick” (Fig. 4.1). Lamb admits to being to being “not a little scandalized” by the presence of the Garrick monument in the Abbey, particularly for the “introduction of theatrical airs and gestures into a place set apart to remind us of the saddest realities” that it represents (“Tragedies,” 97). The shudder Lamb feels at the presence of the monument to Garrick is rather intensified when, stepping closer to it, he is able to read “inscribed under this harlequin figure” these lines of poetry: To paint fair Nature, by divine command, Her magic pencil in his glowing hand, A Shakespeare rose: then to expand his fame Wide o’er this breathing world, a Garrick came. Though sunk in death the forms the Poet drew, The Actor’s genius bade them breathe anew; © The Author(s) 2019 H. Marchitello, Remediating Shakespeare in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22837-8_4

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Fig. 4.1 David Garrick Memorial, Westminster Abbey (Copyright: Dean and Chapter of Westminster)

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Though, like the bard himself, in night they lay, Immortal Garrick call’d them back to day: And till ETERNITY with power sublime, Shall mark the mortal hour of hoary TIME, SHAKESPEARE and GARRICK like twin stars shall shine, And earth irradiate with a beam divine. (qtd. in “Tragedies,” 97)

Lamb decides to forego a critique—or, even, much of a comment on the verse as verse (“It would be an insult to my readers’ understandings to attempt anything like a criticism on this farrago of false thoughts and nonsense” [“Tragedies,” 97])—and moves on immediately to his objections to what we might call the cult of the actor and, moreover, the problematical assumption (as Lamb sees it) that Garrick (or any actor, for that matter) can be so venerated as to be understood as “possessing a mind congenial with the poet’s ” (“Tragedies,” 97). I am very much interested to follow Lamb in his critique, but less interested in setting aside consideration of the poem inscribed on the Garrick monument. I will therefore pause here briefly to consider “To paint fair nature” before moving on to Lamb’s critique of the monument’s presence and the arguments it embodies on the nature of actors and acting and both the figure of Shakespeare and his plays. “To paint fair nature” was written by the novelist and poet Samuel Jackson Pratt and has, within the context of remediation in general—and remediations of Shakespeare in particular—special significance in the present discussion. While the poem features a set of more or less standard tropes—especially Shakespeare as Nature’s poet—it also manages to introduce something new: the notion that Shakespeare’s works had fallen into an oblivion so absolute that it was only through the efforts of Garrick as actor that they have been revived at all: it is the “Actor’s genius” that causes Shakespeare’s work to “breathe anew.” And what is immortal in this poem is neither Shakespeare nor his works, but rather Garrick himself who in effect lends Shakespeare some of his reflected glory that alone is able to guarantee something like the eternal fame of “Shakespeare.” In Pratt’s version, the immortality typically assigned to Shakespeare and his works is enabled only by the genius of Garrick. And together the poet and his savior, who affects the resurrection of the works that otherwise lay in perpetual night, will shine in the firmament and “irradiate” the world “with a beam divine.”2 Pratt’s celebration of Garrick, quite apart from the particular manner of its expression (and apart, too, from the matter of the quality of the poetic articulation), stands in stark contrast to Lamb’s understanding of

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the nature of Shakespeare’s works, especially the tragedies, as well as his understanding of the nature of the theatrical experience more generally. Lamb’s anti-theatricalism, particularly when the drama in question is one of Shakespeare’s, functions here as one pole for the following discussion of Lamb’s relationship to Shakespeare; the second, which will be addressed below, is Lamb’s flirtation with the counterfeit, in the form of Falstaff’s Letters that he produced in collaboration with his lifelong friend James (Jem) White in 1796. As I will argue in this chapter, Lamb’s landmark work as Shakespeare remediator, written in collaboration with his sister Mary, Tales from Shakespeare (1807), can be understood as emerging precisely from the uneasy point of contact between his anti-theatricalism, on the one hand, and his interest and skill in literary counterfeiting, on the other.3

I After he has seen the Garrick monument and read Pratt’s poem in praise of the actor, Lamb takes the lavish praise heaped upon actors as a curiosity (and, in truth, as an affront) that requires examination. For Lamb, the questions begin with the tendency people have of confounding “the power of originating poetical images and conception with the faculty of being able to read or recite the same when put into words.” What allows the connection between “that absolute mastery over the heart and soul of man” displayed by the great poets with “those low tricks upon the eye and ear, which a player by observing a few general effects, which some common passion, as grief, anger, &c. usually has upon the gestures and exterior, can so easily compass” (“Tragedies,” 97–98)? In an essential way, the fundamental difference between poet and player toward which Lamb is moving is a function of the distinction between knowing, on the part of the poet, and mere imitation, on the part of the player: To know the internal workings and movements of a great mind, of an Othello or a Hamlet for instance, the when and the why and the how far they should be moved; to what pitch a passion is becoming; to give the reins and to pull in the curb exactly at the moment when the drawing in or the slacking is most graceful; seems to demand a reach of intellect of a vastly different extent from that which is employed upon the bare imitation of the signs of these passions in the countenance or gesture, which signs are usually observed to be most lively and emphatic in the weaker sort of minds. … (“Tragedies,” 98)

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To be sure, there is a certain elitism at play in this argument, an assumption about the “sort of minds” of spectators who are seemingly bound to be impressed by the tricks of acting. But there is something else, too, something beyond the more or less standard “knowledge” of an intellectual superiority that, after all, is typical of such assessments of the general theater spectatorship in deference to the knowledgeable reader (who also happens typically to be the spectator’s social superior as well). And indeed, Lamb reveals this informing conceit directly: it is the theater itself and its necessary means of production: But such is the instantaneous nature of the impressions which we take in at the eye and ear at a playhouse, compared with the slow apprehension oftentimes of the understanding in reading, that we are apt not only to sink the play-writer in the consideration which we pay to the actor, but even to identify in our minds in a perverse manner, the actor with the character which he represents. It is difficult for a frequent playgoer to disembarrass the idea of Hamlet from the person and voice of Mr K[emble]. We speak of Lady Macbeth, while we are in reality thinking of Mrs S[iddons]. (“Tragedies,” 98)

Lamb is careful to note his gratitude for having seen, with “a very high degree of satisfaction,” Kemble and Siddons play one of Shakespeare’s tragedies. These great players, Lamb tells us, and the play in performance, too, “seemed to embody and realize conceptions which had hitherto assumed no distinct shape.” But in spite of this benefit, Lamb assures us of a dear price we pay “all our life after for this juvenile pleasure, this sense of distinctness.” He continues, to devastating effect: When the novelty is past, we find to our cost that instead of realizing an idea, we have only materialized and brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood. We have let go a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance. (“Tragedies,” 98)

Citing both a weariness with lines of Shakespeare endlessly quoted and repeated (school boys who have been made to memorize speeches from Henry V , for instance), as well as something like a deadening exhaustion and fatigue that arise from hearing Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy “so handled and pawed about by declamatory boys and men, and torn so inhumanly from its living place and principle of continuity in the play, till it is become to me a perfect dead member” (“Tragedies,” 99), Lamb is prepared to make an absolute statement that makes clear two distinct features of his

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understanding of Shakespeare: a faith in Shakespeare’s greatness and an abiding anti-theatricalism combined into a single aesthetic: It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help but being of opinion that the plays of Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on a stage, than those of almost any other dramatist whatever. Their distinguished excellence is a reason that they should be so. There is so much in them, which comes not under the province of acting, with which eye, and tone, and gesture, have nothing to do. (“Tragedies,” 99)

As is perhaps already clear (and it becomes even clearer as Lamb continues his critique of acting), this anti-theatricalism is founded upon what was, in 1811 when Lamb published his essay on the tragedies, a novel idea: that Shakespeare’s plays were essentially about character, rather than, say, plot or moral or action.4 The error that follows as a consequence of the theater’s need for “flesh and blood” is the substitution of “elocution” (“Tragedies,” 99) for what we might call the psychology of the characters represented through their speech. In Shakespeare’s plays, “the form of speaking, whether it be in soliloquy or dialogue, is only a medium, and often a highly artificial one, for putting the reader or spectator into possession of that knowledge of the inner structure and workings of mind in character, which he could otherwise never have arrived at in that form of composition by any gift short of intuition” (“Tragedies,” 99). Lamb knows of Garrick’s performances of Hamlet, though he never witnessed one himself. But the legend, as it were, of Garrick’s Hamlet—the particular praise of “the magic of his eye, and of his commanding voice”—point not to the prince, but rather to the player’s “form and gesture” so completely that the assessment of the play and of Garrick’s Hamlet follows from his acting and its techniques and not from the character of Hamlet: “it is not what the character is, but how he looks; not what he says, but how he speaks it” (“Tragedies,” 101). Language in the form of scripted and spoken speech becomes the enemy, as it were, of the attempt to portray character, on the part of the poet, and our ability as spectators in the theater to apprehend that character. So much is this threat a destabilizing force in the theater that performed speech not only comes to depend upon the techniques of playing, but performed speech can at times even function as detached from character. “All the passions and changes of passion,” for instance, “is but rising or falling a note or two in the voice.” And the effect? “So contagious,” Lamb writes, “the counterfeit appearance of any emotion is, that

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let the words be what they will, the look and tone shall carry it off and make it pass for deep skill in the passions” (“Tragedies,” 101). According to Lamb, in the theater we quite happily take the counterfeit for the thing itself, a transaction enabled by our willingness to see performed passion “as a copy of the usual external effects of such passions; or at least as being true to that symbol of the emotion which passes current at the theatre for it ” (“Tragedies,” 102). This constitutes for Lamb an impropriety in the theater: our attention is inevitably diverted from the character that the poetry would construct for us to the “flesh and blood” player and the performance of speech so that, for instance, the stagings of Richard III provide no end of horrors on the stage such that [n]ot one of the spectators who have witnessed Mr C[ooke]’s exertions in that part, but has come away with a proper conviction that Richard is a very wicked man, and kills little children in their beds, with something like the pleasure which the giants and ogres in children’s books are represented to have taken in that practice; moreover, that he is very close and shrewd and devilish cunning, for you could see that by his eye. (“Tragedies,” 105)

The problem for Lamb is that this representation of Richard bears little in common with the character that as readers we find in Shakespeare’s play. Characters in Shakespeare’s tragedies are “so much the objects of meditation rather than of interest or curiosity as to their actions.” For Lamb, when we “are reading any of his great criminal characters,” our focus is wholly different from that enforced by the mechanics of theatrical representation: “we think not so much of the crimes which they commit, as of the ambition, the aspiring spirit, the intellectual activity, which prompts them to overleap those moral fences” (“Tragedies,” 106). Once we have left the study and entered the theater, we have at the same instant “given up that vantage-ground of abstraction which reading possesses over seeing.” And this leads to Lamb’s well-known pronouncement on stagings of King Lear: [T]o see Lear acted,—to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. (“Tragedies,” 107)

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No amount of stage technique or attention to costume or scenery can neutralize the threat that theater represents by its very nature. In fact, what Lamb calls the “luxury of stage-improvements” (“Tragedies,” 110), like acting techniques themselves, only further compromise our relationship to character and to the play itself—the “inevitable consequence,” Lamb avers, “of imitating everything, to make all things natural. Whereas the reading of a tragedy is a fine abstraction.” He continues: It presents to the fancy just so much of external appearances as to make us feel that we are among flesh and blood, while by far the greater and better part of our imagination is employed upon the thoughts and internal machinery of the character. (“Tragedies,” 111) 5

In addition to Lamb’s deliberate and thoughtful anti-theatricalism (which emerges in his essay as a working theory, as it were, for Lamb’s general relationship to Shakespeare) there is another important critique of staged Shakespeare that helps to locate Lamb as a remediator of Shakespeare: his utter contempt for and rejection of adaptations of Shakespeare. Lamb considers Garrick’s complicity in staging adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, some of which (as many critics have discussed at length) held the stage for many decades. “I am almost disposed,” Lamb writes of Garrick, to deny him the merit of being an admirer of Shakespeare. A true lover of his excellencies he certainly was not; for would any true lover of them have admitted into his matchless scenes such ribald trash as Tate and Cibber, and the rest of them that—‘With their darkness durst affront his light’—have foisted into the acting plays of Shakespeare? (“Tragedies,” 105)6

II Taken together, Lamb’s anti-theatricalism, on the one hand, and, on the other, his unqualified rejection of such “improvements” to Shakespeare as represented by Tate and Cibber (among others), help to define key interests and characteristics of his own remediations of six of Shakespeare’s tragedies as represented in Tales from Shakespeare. They serve too as a partial frame within which to consider those remediations—and Lamb’s version of King Lear in particular (the topic of Chapter 5, below). The second half of that frame, as I suggested above, is Lamb’s flirtation with the counterfeit in the

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form of his relationship to Falstaff’s Letters , a project published in 1796 under James White’s name, but rather vigorously supported and promoted by Lamb in private letters and in print—and perhaps, as some of Lamb’s contemporaries as well as a number of modern critics believe, partially written by Lamb.7 Indeed, Lamb’s participation in the composition of Falstaff’s Letters was asserted by Robert Southey, who, in a letter to Edward Moxon, dated 2 February 1836, comments on Lamb’s long friendship with White and writes that “He [White] and Lamb were joint authors of the Original Letters of Falstaff.”8 In Falstaff’s Letters , White and Lamb were explicitly courting the notoriety, if not the infamy, associated with William-Henry Ireland’s Shakespeare forgeries. The story of Ireland’s “discovery” of a trove of early modern manuscripts and documents relating to Shakespeare—which included deeds and letters, and eventually even a complete play, Vortigern and Rowena—had just come to its spectacular conclusion with the complete failure of Vortigern in its first performance at Drury Lane (organized by Sheridan, with John Kemble playing the role of Vortigern) and the publication (on the previous day) of Edmond Malone’s devastating critique of the Shakespeare artifacts, An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments, Published Dec. 24 MDCCXCV. and Attributed to Shakespeare.9 The dedication—or rather, in parodic homage to Ireland’s pseudo-Shakespearean orthography and idiom adopted in this paratext, the Dedicatyone—to Falstaff’s Letters is in fact inscribed to “Master Samuel Irelaunde. Right Curteis and Erudite Syrre” (FL, A3).10 The dedication seeks to establish a continuity between Ireland’s discoveries and the Falstaff letters, as well as the labors that have brought them forth by “paynes=takeing Wights (like you or me) who from the mynes of remote tyme by dynte of toyle do brynge for the to view the pretious golde and the sylvere” (FL, A3). At the same time, it offers its praise of Ireland’s achievements: “Methinks you doe call to life agayne thatte swote swanne of Avonne, whose Songes dyd sounde so pleasaunt in the eares of thatte peerlesse Mayden Quene and renounded victrix of Spayne, Elizabeth” (FL, A4v). Calling, then, upon Ireland to remain steadfast—“The tyme dothe faste approche, nay even now is close at honde, when the overcharged cloudes of scepticysme muste incontinentlye vanish before convictione’s serener Welkin, and Edmonde shall in vayne resume hys laboures” (FL, A4v)—the dedication recommends Falstaff’s letters as “the impresse of a ryghte venerable picture traunsmitted downewardes through oure house forre hondredde yeares.” They are not

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only remarkable in themselves, but they “doe reflecte a lighte collaterale uponne they clerkish manuscryptes” (FL, A4v–A5). In a well known letter he wrote to Coleridge, Lamb makes mention of the impending publication of Falstaff’s Letters and the connection to Ireland’s forgeries: “White is on the eve of publishing (he took the limit from Vortigern) Original Letters of Falstaff, Shallow, etc., a copy you shall have when it comes out. They are without exception the best imitations I ever saw” (FL, vii). But where Ireland’s “Shakespeare Papers” were forgeries, Lamb understands Falstaff’s Letters to be imitations. Reviewers understood this distinction as well; a review published in June 1797 in the Critical Review (perhaps at Coleridge’s suggestion), makes the case for Falstaff’s Letters and their difference from Ireland’s forgeries: The humorous characters of Shakespeare have seldom been successfully imitated. Dr. Kendrick wrote a play called Falstaff’s Wedding, in which he introduced the merry Knight and his companions; but the peculiar quaintness of the character was lost by being sunk in modern wit. The author of this little work before us has, we think, been somewhat more successful, and must have given his days and nights to the study of the language of Falstaff, Dame Quickly, Slender, etc. His object, indeed, seems to be to ridicule the late gross imposture of Norfolk-street; and certain it is that had these letters been introduced into the world, prepared in the manner of the Ireland MSS., the internal evidence would have spoken more loudly in their favour. (FL, vii–viii)

The complaint against Ireland is explicit here; another review, published in November 1796 in the Monthly Review, casts Falstaff’s Letters in a different relation to Ireland’s papers: they are criticisms of Ireland’s forgeries: It was not to be expected that the late extraordinary attempt to work on the national credulity by the pretended Shakespearian reliques, should pass without the gibes of the witty, as well as the sober animadversions of the grave and learned. (FL, viii–ix)11

Lamb continued his praise and support of Falstaff’s Letters , emphasizing time and again their great virtue. In a letter to Thomas Manning, Lamb declares them “a bundle of the sharpest, queerest, profoundest humours of any these juice-drained latter times have spawned” (FL, x). And years later, in the 5 September 1819 number of Leigh Hunt’s The Examiner, Lamb is not only still praising Falstaff’s Letters , but is now prepared to ennoble them not merely as imitations of Shakespeare, but indeed as “Shakespearian.”

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Noting a purchase of the book “at the Roxburgh sale for five guineas,” Lamb advises his readers: “if you shall ever light upon a copy in the same way, we counsel you to buy it. We are deceived if there be not in it much of the true Shakespearian stuff.” And later in the same piece, Lamb expands his praise: “Is not the humour of them elaborate, cogitabund, fanciful? Carry they not the true image and superscription of the father which begat them? Are they not steeped all over in character—subtle, profound, unctuous? Is not here the very effigies of the Knight? Could a counterfeit Jack Falstaff come by these conceits?” And this piece culminates in a celebration of Jem White, “my fine-tempered friend,” who undertook Falstaff’s Letters “from the fulness of a young soul, newly kindling at the Shakespearian flame, and bursting to be delivered of a rich exuberance of conceits—I had almost said kindred with those of the full Shakespearian genius itself —were these letters dictated” (FL, xi–xii). Lamb writes this after White’s death and grows both nostalgic and melancholic considering his lost friend, who took up the Henry IV plays at Lamb’s suggestion: We think at our recommendation he read them, rather late in life, though still he was but a youth. He may have forgotten, but we cannot, the pleasant evenings which ensued at the Boar’s Head (as we called our tavern, though in reality the sign was not that, nor the street Eastcheap,–for that honoured place of resort has long since passed away), when over our pottle of sherris he would talk you nothing but pure Falstaff the long evenings through. Like his, the wit of J.W. was deep, recondite, imaginative, full of goodly figures and fancies. Those evenings have long since passed away, and nothing comparable to them has come in their stead, or can come. We have heard the chimes at midnight. (FL, xii–xiii)

This passage can serve as an epitome of many of those motivations and issues—and emotions—that together inform the work of remediation. To start, it constitutes an origin narrative: White takes up the Henry IV plays at Lamb’s urging, and thus begins White’s deep engagement and perhaps identification with Falstaff, in particular, among the many “tavern” characters that those plays feature. At the same time, Lamb’s recollection also introduces the notion of youth, or youthfulness: in this case, Jem White’s—though to highlight White’s youth is at the same time to conjure Lamb’ youth, as well. The passage also introduces memory and, more particularly, memory as the preventative set against the forgetfulness and, what’s more, the loss felt by Lamb and figured in the “long since passed

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away” days of the resort and, at the same time, the absolute loss of Falstaff/Jem White.

III More and more is a knowledge of Shakespeare coming to be regarded as a necessary part of an Englishman’s education; and the Editor knows of no first introduction to that study at once so winning and so helpful as that supplied by these narrative versions.

So writes Alfred Ainger in 1878 of Tales from Shakespeare, by Charles and Mary Lamb.12 The Tales have, since their initial composition and publication, been linked to questions and matters of education.13 For Ainger, the education in question is the one necessary to the fashioning of a proper nineteenth-century Englishman, with all of the national and gender chauvinism that the term implies, plus the newly-discovered need for a thorough grounding in the works of Shakespeare. For Charles and Mary Lamb writing seventy years earlier, the educational imperative that informs the Tales is different (the need for the Englishman who can serve the Empire has not yet entirely emerged), but perhaps no less significant for that. And as becomes clear in reading the Tales , as well as many other works by the Lambs (collaborative and single-authored), the focus becomes a matter of insuring the availability of proper books for young readers whose moral development is of primary importance. Indeed, it is the lamentable lack of such works that helps inform and underwrite the Lambs’ interest in children’s literature. In an often-quoted letter from 1802 to Coleridge, Charles Lamb offers a dismissive and damning account of the current state of literature for young readers: briefly recounting a recent visit he and Mary paid to Newberry’s bookshop, he complains that “Mrs. Barbauld[‘s] stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery” and that when Mary asked for them, the clerk “hardly deign’d to reach them off an old exploded corner of a shelf.” And in their places? “Mrs. B’s and Mrs Trimmer’s nonsense lay in piles about.”14 Lamb makes clear that his particular objection is to the method by which “knowledge” is conveyed through such works: Knowledge insignificant & vapid as Mrs. B’s books convey, it seems, must come to a child in the shape of knowledge, & his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers, when he has learnt, that a Horse is an Animal, & Billy is better than a Horse, & such like. … (Marrs, 2: 81)

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The critical contrast for Lamb is between this manifestly didactic literature—or, rather, style of literature—and a completely different form in which knowledge may be conveyed less conspicuously, yielding in the process a less reductively instrumental work. Instead of knowledge in the shape of knowledge, Lamb would prefer “that beautiful Interest in wild tales, which made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child” (Marrs, 2: 81). And this leads to Lamb’s peroration of the subject: Science has succeeded to Poetry no less in the little walks of Children than with Men. —: Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil? Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with Tales and old wives fables in childhood, you had been crammed with Geography & Natural History.? Damn them. I mean the cursed Barbauld Crew, those Blights & Blasts of all that his Human in man & child. (Marrs, 2: 81–82)15

Charles Lamb’s arguments on the nature of children as readers and what might constitute appropriate reading material are already in place as early as 1802. The opportunity to participate in creating such works as young readers needed—works that in some form embodied the “beautiful interest in wild tales” Charles Lamb recalled with great nostalgia and longing—took the form of the Tales .16 As Lamb reports in an important letter to Thomas Manning, his and Mary’s Shakespeare collection was a work commissioned by William and Mary Godwin, for publication in their Juvenile Library series: [Mary] is doing for Godwin’s Bookseller 20 of Shakespeare’s plays to be made into Childrens tales. Six are already done by her to wit The Tempest, Winters Tale, Midsummer Night, Much ado, Two Gentlemen of Verona & Cymbeline: & the Merchant of Venice is in forwardness: I have done Othello & Macbeth and mean to do all the Tragedies. I think it will be popular among the little people. Besides money. It’s to bring in 60 guineas: Mary has done them capitally, I think you’d think. (Marrs, 2: 225)

As this letter indicates, the composition of the Tales was a collaborative effort—but one that Charles, at least, was careful to identify by individual author, with the division of the Shakespeare kingdom articulated along clear gender lines: Mary would write the comedies and romances, while Charles wrote the tragedies. (Both writers would ignore the history plays.) In her essay “Shakespeare for Girls: Mary Lamb and Tales

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from Shakespeare,” Jean I. Marsden notes this division, but argues that “such rigid distinctions distort the actual composition process.”17 Citing Mary Lamb’s description of the scene of writing, with brother and sister “writing on one table (but not on one cushion sitting) like Hermia & Helena,” Marsden redefines the nature of the collaboration as “a communal process.” 18 The Lambs “may have worked initially on separate sheets, but they then passed these sheets across a shared table.” Quite reasonably Marsden argues that any conclusions about a strict assigning of authorial responsibility are likely impossible: “As a result it is difficult (if not impossible) to distinguish where Mary’s work stops and Charles’s begins: we know they began with different topics, but no significant distinctions exist in the finished product of collaboration” (Marsden, 50–51). For Marsden, that finished collaborative product amounted to the “’feminization’ of Shakespeare,” a project dedicated to fashioning retellings of the plays that would be suitable for a female audience, especially a young female audience and the very serious need to fill the “gap in the education of young ladies whose access to challenging imaginative fiction was limited” (Marsden, 47–48). In this whole enterprise, Marsden argues, “Mary was the informing presence” and attaining the proper “moral effect” of reading the work was the primary goal (Marsden, 51). This argument is a powerful one and indeed opens our understanding of the Tales to certain strategies at work in their crafting that align with presiding educational theories offered, for instance, by figures such as Hannah More, on the education of girls. As Marsden points out, the language we find at the close of the Lambs’ Preface to the Tales makes explicit their significant investment in fashioning the moral health of their readers: What these Tales shall have been to the young readers, that and much more it is the writers’ wish that the true Plays of Shakespeare may prove to them in older years—enrichers of the fancy, strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all sweet and honourable thoughts and actions, to teach courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity: for of examples, teaching these virtues, his pages are full.19

At the same time, however, this argument depends upon the gender of the reader as the determining vector of appropriate readership for the Tales , and hence of the very nature of the undertaking altogether. And while (as will be discussed below) the Lambs’ Preface, which Marsden quotes to good effect, does indeed engage directly and explicitly the matter of

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gender and the pressing needs of young female readers in particular, and while individual tales indeed “emphasize humility, modesty, and gentleness, the virtues traditionally assigned to women” (Marsden, 55), it does not seem wholly necessary to our understanding of the Tales that we privilege gender over what is (also) undeniably a critical factor: the youth of the Lambs’ intended readership. Nor does it follow, for that matter, that virtues traditionally assigned to women are not virtues that ought to be shared more generally, regardless of gender. As is well known, the first edition of Tales from Shakespeare (1807) bore only the name of Charles Lamb on the title page. In a letter to William Wordsworth (dated 29 January 1807) Charles Lamb vents a certain degree of anger over a number of details of the published book, especially the fact that his name alone—or at all—appears on the title page and (an issue to be addressed below) the copper plate illustrations, which Charles Lamb found wholly inadequate.20 On the matter of his name appearing on the title page, Lamb indicts William Godwin, who “in the first place cheated me into putting a name to them, which I did not mean, but do not repent, & then wrote a puff about their simplicity &c. to go with the advertisemt. As in my name!” For the sake of clarity and honesty (“Enough of this egregious dupery”), Lamb wishes to make the matter of authorship perfectly clear, at least to Wordsworth: I will try to abstract the load of teazing circumstances from the Stories & tell you that I am answerable for Lear, Macbeth, Timon, Romeo, Hamlet, Othello, for occasionally a tail piece or correction of grammar, for none of the cuts and all of the spelling. The rest is my Sister’s—. We think Pericles of hers the best, & Othello of mine—but I hope all have some good. As You Like It we like least. (Marrs, 2: 256)

Here Lamb protests Godwin’s having taken the liberty of affixing his name as the author of the Tales . But he does so, it seems, not because he believes that both his and Mary’s name should appear, but rather because no name should appear on the title page. This would be an entirely conventional gesture in the period that bore witness to vast numbers of anonymous publications; indeed, two other books written collaboratively by Charles and Mary Lamb—Mrs. Leicester’s School : Or, the History of Several Young Ladies, Related by Themselves (1809) and Poetry for Children, Entirely Original (1809)—were published anonymously as part of Godwins’ Juvenile Library. Anonymous publication of the Tales would also be an interesting

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argument about the Tales : declining to assign authorship of the tales as remediations in effect serves to assign authorship to Shakespeare. What the “anonymous” book would present would be tales from Shakespeare. What is exceptional (and to Charles, what is objectionable) is not the lack of Mary Lamb’s name on the title page, but the appearance of any author’s name. His letter to Wordsworth just quoted that seeks to clarify the question of authorship ends with a quick but significant postscript: “God bless me, I had almost forgot, My part of the Preface begins in the middle of a sentence, in the last but on page after a colon thus:—which if they be happily so done &c. the former part hath a more feminine turn and does hold me up as something as an instructor to young Ladies: but upon my modesty’s honour I wrote it not—” (Marrs 2: 256–57). This is a quite particular and specific effort to identify precisely where Mary’s efforts in the Preface end and where his begin—literally in the midst of a long sentence that aims to address directly the matter of the imagined reading audience. The sentence begins there: “For young ladies too, it has been the intention chiefly to write,” especially given the much rarer access young girls would have had (at least typically) to “their fathers’ libraries.” And since young male readers have enjoyed a much earlier access—and because they “frequently have the best scenes of Shakespeare by heart, before their sisters are permitted to look into this manly book,” Mary Lamb will not offer to recommend the Tales to those “young gentlemen who can read them so much better in the originals,” but rather encourage their assistance “in explaining to their sisters such parts as are hardest for them to understand.” It is through this assistance and guidance (the “young gentlemen” are asked to select “what is proper for a young sister’s ear”) that Mary Lamb’s imagined audience can come to the greatest understanding and enjoyment of Shakespeare’s plays. That is (and here is where Charles’ portion of the sentence begins) only if the adaptations “prove delightful to any of the young readers.”And if they have proved delightful, then the hope is that in time they will lead the developing reader to read “the Plays at full length” (Tales , 2). As suggested above, there are clearly two general audiences that the Preface, and the Lambs, have posited: on the one hand, young girls, where the emphasis is largely (though not exclusively) on their gender, and on the other hand, young readers, where the emphasis is largely (though not exclusively) on their youth. That these audiences happen to overlap—with the former especially important for Mary, the latter for Charles—should not displace the special significance each has for the two authors of the Tales from Shakespeare.

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The second serious complaint Charles Lamb offers in the letter to Wordsworth quoted above concerns the copper plate illustrations that appeared in the 1807 edition of the Tales : You will forgive the plates, when I tell you that they were left to the direction of Godwin, who left the choice of subjects to the bad baby, who from mischief—(I suppose) has chosen one from damn’d beastly vulgarity (vide Merch. Venice) where no atom of authority was in the tale to justify it—to another has given a name which exists not in the tale, Nic. Bottom, & which she thought would be funny, though in this I suspect his hand, for I guess her reading does not reach far enough to know Bottom’s Xtian name— —& one of Hamlet, & Grave diggg., a scene which is not hinted at in the story, & you might as well have put King Canute the Great reproving his courtiers—the rest are Giants & Giantesses. … (Marrs, 2: 256)21

Charles Lamb’s critique of the plates can function for us as a way to think about the nature of remediation—both as understood by Lamb and, more generally, remediation as such. Charles Lamb’s concerns about—actually, his dissatisfaction with—the copper plates used by Godwin in the 1807 publication of the Tales can certainly be understood in precisely the terms he offers: they represent above all the failure of “taste.”22 To the extent that they are failures of taste and as such negatively impact his retellings, they represent for Lamb a failure of both friendship and professionalism. These matters are easily understood, although they are perhaps essentially subjective at their core: we must assume that Godwin, at least (or perhaps only the “bad baby”) found them neither vulgar nor failures. The matter of their aptness, however, is a different kind of objection altogether. What Lamb finds so objectionable is the poor fit that the illustrations make with the tales as written, especially in such cases (and there are more than a few) in which the copper plates illustrate moments that are literally not included in the retellings: the figure of Nick Bottom from Dream, for instance, or the scene of Hamlet (and Horatio) with the gravediggers. Neither Bottom nor the gravedigger appears in their respective tales. Their excision (as will be discussed below) was the cost of a certain aesthetic sensibility that the Lambs brought to the task of remediating Shakespeare for young readers. The ground, broadly, for their exclusion is the nearly universal rule in the Tales that “low” or comic characters have no appropriate place. As a consequence, in both the tragedies and the comedies/romances, the comic characters we would expect to find—including Caliban, together with Nick Bottom and Hamlet’s gravedigger—disappear without a trace.

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Setting aside for the moment any concerns we may have with this aesthetic and the absolute choices it requires, one can easily understand Charles Lamb’s unhappiness with the illustrations that accompany certain retellings that depict characters or events that are not actually in the texts the Lambs produced. But this itself addresses very directly the matter of the nature of remediation, which by virtue of the participation of at least two authors (and in this sense illustrators can be considered authors), is always and necessarily, we might say, a collaborative act. But Lamb objects to the collaboration that produced the 1807 Tales . And while it may be a question of Lamb’s illustrator collaborator having been selected for all the wrong reasons and without Lamb’s approval or even knowledge, the fact of what we can perhaps call the extra-textual copper plate illustrations remains. The illustrations selected for at least some of the retellings themselves illustrate many of the technical and philosophical issues and problems that attend the practices of remediation. By what measure or mechanism is an artist to decide which scenes ought to be illustrated and why? As the extra-textual illustrations in Lambs’ Tales demonstrate perfectly, at least some of the time, what the illustrator (together with the publisher—in this case William or Mary Godwin) was illustrating was Shakespeare’s play and not the remediated version written by Charles or Mary Lamb. When, for instance, the illustrator depicts Hamlet and Horatio conversing with the gravedigger (Fig. 4.2)—a scene that (like the gravedigger himself) does not occur in the adaptation—we must understand the illustration as a failure. But this failure cannot be understood as an aesthetic one: the image as image may be aesthetically pleasing and, even, beautiful. But as a piece of visual information, the illustration fails precisely because the scene and one of the characters in it are wholly unknown to the text the image is meant to illustrate. If we can imagine (though this will be difficult) a reader who does not know about Hamlet and the gravedigger, such a reader of Lamb’s tale would find the image perfectly obscure and meaningless. And on these grounds the illustration would be a failure. But there is more to the case than this. Indeed, the centrality of the gravedigger’s scene to Hamlet , along with the iconic moment it presents of Hamlet contemplating the skull (which is anticipated in the illustration in Tales ), serves to demonstrate how thoroughly that scene has come to stand in for the play. By metonymy, the gravedigger, the open grave, and Yorick’s skull have together come to figure Hamlet . In fact, the presence of this illustration in Lamb’s adaptation that doesn’t include them can bear witness to nothing else. By this measure, the gravedigger’s scene is

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Fig. 4.2 From “Hamlet,” Tales from Shakespeare (1807) (By permission, Folger Shakespeare Library)

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perhaps the perfect illustration of Hamlet . No wonder, then, that the one illustration of this play in Tales should be the gravedigger’s scene. It stands, we can say, as a monument to the play itself. And the fact that the scene the illustration pictures is absent from the adaptation is itself something of a fulfillment of the logic of the monument, as discussed in this book. And at the same time it presents—that is, makes present —in its very existence the logic of haunting that is so fundamental to the play. Lamb’s adaptation, that is, is itself haunted by the ghost of Hamlet . The same, or at least very similar, process of examining each play for material—characters, particular speeches and lines, whole episodes—that was to be included, and that which was to be excluded, would have been undertaken by Lamb as remediator of Shakespeare. In a sense, the 1807 Tales offers not a unified retelling of plays, but rather at least two different ones: the Lambs’ version and the version articulated by the illustrations. If it were the case that the illustrator depicted extra-textual scenes but once or twice, we could imagine perhaps thinking of them simply as errors—failures to recall the adaptive texts. But that this kind of “error” happens with such frequency leads to the conclusion that they are something more than errors or memory (or attention) lapses. And where there are two adaptations in one text, there is inevitably conflict that arises very precisely from different versions (or visions) of the original text, the remediated text, or both. As this brief consideration of the extra-textuals indicates, the practices of remediation are many and complex—and the politics of remediation that lie behind and effectively generate these practices are obscured in the final works themselves (they appear explicitly, if at all, usually in an author/adapter’s paratextual commentary, prefaces such as Lambs’, and introductions, and the like). The practices of remediation involve the identification of material to be included, that material which is to be excluded, those changes such as transposition of scenes or the identification of central issues of interpretation that will be highlighted—to say nothing of the manner selected for modernizing the Shakespearean language and idiom, or such formal decisions as the actual generic form the adaptation will ultimately take. For Charles Lamb and his retellings of Shakespeare’s tragedies—as for Mary Lamb and her adaptations of comedies and romances—these, and many other decisions besides (moral, practical, formal, linguistic, tonal, and so on) all required consideration and required resolution in order that there might be remediations at all. By way of illustration, we can look to a few opening gestures that introduce specific tales; this will provide not only a sense of the various ways

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the Lambs answered some of the pressing demands of remediation, but also afford a moment to pose questions about some of these practices—to consider, that is, the politics of remediation. Not a few of the Tales begin as fairy tales: There was a certain island in the sea, the only inhabitants of which were an old man named Prospero, and his daughter Miranda, a very beautiful young lady. (Tales , 3)

Others begin by depositing the requisite historical information in the opening sentence: During the time of Augustus Caesar, Emperor of Rome, there reigned in England (which was then called Britain) a king whose name was Cymbeline. (Tales , 70)

Or with “biographical” information: There lived in the palace at Messina two ladies, whose names were Hero and Beatrice. Hero was the daughter, and Beatrice the niece, of Leonato, the governor of Messina. (Tales , 29)

Still others begin by assigning responsibility and blame from the very start: Shylock, the Jew, lived at Venice; he was an usurer, who had amassed an immense fortune by lending money at great interest to Christian merchants. Shylock, being a hard-hearted man, exacted the payment of the money he lent with such severity that he was much disliked by all good men, and particularly by Antonio, a young merchant of Venice; and Shylock as much hated Antonio, because he used to lend money to people in distress, and would never take any interest for the money he lent; therefore there was great enmity between this covetous Jew and the generous merchant Antonio. (Tales , 60)

And, finally, there are others that fairly give away the farm at the very outset: Gertrude, queen of Denmark, becoming a widow by the sudden death of King Hamlet, in less than two month after his death married his brother Claudius, which was noted by all people at the time for a strange act of indiscretion, or unfeelingness, or worse: for this Claudius did no ways resemble her late husband in the qualities of his person or his mind, but was as contemptible in outward appearance, as he was base and unworthy in disposition; and

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suspicions did not fail to arise in the minds of some, that he had privately made away with his brother, the late king, with the view of marrying his widow, and ascending the throne of Denmark, to the exclusion of young Hamlet, the son of the buried king, and lawful successor to the throne. (Tales , 172)

These few examples represent various ways in which the Tales begin and as such offer some indication of the variety of rhetorical and literary character individual tales may assume. My interest in offering these specimens is largely illustrative: it helps to suggest the range of tonal—as well as generic—variation available in the Tales . At the same time, though, we can make a few initial observations about these specimens that both hold for the collection as a whole and at the same time provide an opportunity for the analysis of remediation, both its politics and its practices. The first point to make is this: the single most significant change these retellings present is the essential fact that they have narrators. In fact, virtually everything that I have to say about the Tales follows from this single determining fact which is more important, as it were, than any single characteristic or quality of the tales that follow from it in the manner of a consequence.23 The fact that there is a narrator determines the entire fate of the retelling.24 And from this one feature descends the three general categories of difference between the adaptive text (the tale) and the adapted text (the play) to which I now turn: form, content, and execution.

Form The presence of the narrator serves to install a presiding voice that functions both with and as an abstracted intelligence that in turn serves to fashion the tale in a particular way, setting aside certain characters or events or language from the source text, interpolating new language and, at times, new relationships in the tale, and—perhaps most importantly—framing and guiding the readers’ reception of the tale. As I will argue, the adaptive tale is a far less democratic form than the dramatic/theatrical form of the source text, and from this distinction follow the salient traits and qualities of the retelling.25 Because we know that the tale we are reading—in sharp and defining contrast to the plays upon which they are based or from which they in some manner derive—has a narrator, we also know a number of other important things. First, we know that this narrator is simply the projection of an author who is not necessarily identical to that author. That Mary Lamb wrote the

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adaptation of The Merchant of Venice does not mean that she is the same as that tale’s narrator. Likewise, it would be illegitimate to identify the narrator of Timon of Athens with Charles Lamb, who is (only) the tale’s author. A second fact follows in turn from this: the narrator of a given tale—because she or he (and how can we tell this?) is not the author of the tale—effectively becomes a character within the tale. As such, these narrators-as-characters bring with them a certain set of concerns and objectives, together with a whole range of likes and dislikes, attitudes, and understandings about (among other things) the nature of character and the nature of morality. (In this regard, narrators are similar to authors, who also bring with them to their writing a whole range of conscious and unconscious attitudes and the like that help to fashion their work; this coincidence is perhaps at least partly responsible for the automatic assumption of an absolute identity between author and narrator which is in fact specious and perhaps deleterious to our reading of adaptive texts.) This is amply illustrated in the opening paragraph of Charles Lamb’s Hamlet , quoted above in its entirety. As the tale opens it is immediately clear that this narrator has a very specific and particular understanding of a whole array of matters that in the play text are more open to debate and interpretation. This narrator is certain, for example, that Gertrude is indiscreet, unfeeling, or worse. Similarly, this narrator is convinced that suspicions arose in the minds of “some” concerning Claudius and his killing of his brother. And again, the play text is less certain about this point, and is so probably because that question is itself open to individual interpretation. (For my part, I am willing to think that of the whole kingdom, the only person with suspicions is the young Hamlet: “O my prophetic soul!/ My uncle!”)26 And there are other qualities, as it were, of this narrator that are on display in the opening paragraph discernible by what he or she decides to communicate: his interest in placing Gertrude at the center of the tale’s event (and perhaps its psychology) that also serves to identify what in the next paragraph the narrator identifies as Gertrude’s “unadvised action” as the cause of young Hamlet’s problems; or his misunderstanding of Danish monarchical succession as a wholly hereditary system. Instances in which the narrator reveals the thoughts and prejudices and assumptions—reveals, that is, his or her own character—abound throughout the tale, for which plenty let this one further moment stand as example. When describing the voyage at sea and the encounter with the pirates, the narrator offers this summary that comes complete with an interpretation that has the effect of being the only interpretation possible:

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Soon after the ship was attacked by pirates, and a sea-fight commenced; in the course of which Hamlet, desirous to show his valour, with sword in hand singly boarded the enemy’s vessel; while his own ship, in a cowardly manner, bore away, and leaving him to his fate, the two courtiers made the best of their way to England, charged with those letters the sense of which Hamlet had altered to their own deserved destruction. (Tales , 181)

For the narrator, Hamlet boards the pirate ship in order to perform valor and “his” ship veers away not through the strategies (or perhaps the vagaries) of conflict at sea, but rather due to cowardice. And the two unnamed courtiers (known as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the play) sail on to meet deaths that are “deserved.” Absent from this scene at sea is all ambiguity, especially moral ambiguity which rather colors the entire Hamlet at sea episode in the play. The tale also elides any questions of the status of Hamlet’s forgery (if that is what it is), as well as the moral quality of sending the courtiers ignorantly to their deaths. (In the play, this last concern is perhaps marked, albeit subtly, in Horatio’s astonishment: “So Guildestern and Rosencrantz go to’t” [Hamlet , 5.2.56]). A third thing we know, which follows from the fact of the narrator, is that the action depicted in the tale is completed before the retelling actually begins. We notice, that is, that the tale is cast wholly in the past tense. Next to the presence of a narrator, there is no other feature of the tale that so distinguishes it from its dramatic-theatrical source text. For in a play—and this is true whether one is a spectator at a performance or a private reader in the study—all the action unfolds in an enduring present tense. In other words, in addition to all the other formal changes that these tales effect on the plays they retell, they also render the stories of the plays historical narratives. The narrators bring us, in the form of a recitation, a piece of history and offer their tellings as re-tellings. Shakespeare’s plays, in the moment of their performance or reading, enter the world or our reception as if for the first time. Even when the subject is English history, or Roman history before that, there is never anything strictly historical about the plays as they unfold to our apperception in something like real time. Shakespeare’s Hamlet (to continue with that example text) is always happening in the moment of its articulation. The tales, on the other hand, understand the stories that they retell as having always already taken place, and hence the tale is an already completed set of events prior to its opening sentence. In this important way, the tales come to us in the same manner as do fairy tales or folk tales—and this itself suggests that the tales are (like folk

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tales, etc.) more or less self-contained wholes that are portable, infinitely repeatable, and irreducibly moral in nature. And the moral nature of the tales is a function of their form (primarily the presence of the narrators) and form, in turn, engenders certain content that is made to carry not only the entertainment value of the tale (Tales from Shakespeare would not have enjoyed its run of continuous publication since 1807 to today if it were not entertaining), but also their educative value articulated primarily as moral instruction, however subtle and sophisticated it may be.

Content The Lambs’ abiding interest in the educative virtues of introducing young readers to Shakespeare (to say nothing of the benefits of the ready availability of quality literature for children more generally) has been wellestablished in the critical literature. That interest is also clear and present (as mentioned above) in the Preface to their Tales from Shakespeare in which the twin objectives for the Tales is given explicit formulation: the tales, it is to be hoped, will both delight and instruct and thereby will succeed in becoming both “enrichers of the fancy” and “strengtheners of virtue” (Tales , 2). As I have argued in the immediately preceding section, a good deal of the work necessary to realizing these goals is achieved by the formal characteristics of the tales, especially the fact that they have narrators, that these narrators are in effect characters unto themselves, and that the stories told are always historical tales. But the formal nature of the Tales effects only part of the work; the not inconsiderable labor that is left to be accomplished is delivered through the particular content of each tale and as suggested, this content follows from the nature of the form of the tales. Given the emphasis on the moral dimension of the stories retold in the Tales , it is not surprising that there are countless instances of what might be considered censorship: moments when certain features of Shakespeare’s plays are excised from the retelling on the grounds of their inappropriateness for the imagined readership of the Tales . These interventions in the Shakespeare text in adaptation happen generally either because the material in question is assumed to be harmful to the Lambs’ readers because they are girls or because they are young or both, or this material was understood to be too difficult, in one way or another, for these readers. Thus, on the one hand, comic moments construed as low or coarse, together with all moments that touched upon sexuality were eliminated. Such instances were of course readily identifiable and easily found: the drunken porter is

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cut from the Macbeth adaptation, for example, and the bed-trick in All’s Well is reimagined in a highly sanitized version in which conversation with the disguised Helena is offered in lieu of the illicit sexual encounter with Diana: In the evening, after it was dark, Bertram was admitted to Diana’s chamber, and Helena was there ready to receive him. The flattering compliments and love discourse he addressed to Helena were precious sounds to her, though she knew they were meant for Diana; and Bertram was so well pleased with her, that he made her a solemn promise to be her husband, and to love her forever; which she hoped would be prophetic of a real affection, when he should know it was his own wife, the despised Helena, whose conversation had so delighted him. (Tales , 106–7)

The matter of difficulty, on the other hand, is itself a far more difficult matter, in part because difficulty that the Shakespeare text may present the young reader (of either gender) is by and large not a matter of subject matter or content deemed inappropriate in one way or another. Rather, the problems presented by difficulty are more properly either stylistic or linguistic in nature, or else problems that arise from the sheer complexity of character or plot. All of the tales (and this holds true for virtually all remediations of the plays) of necessity seek to simplify: presented with a complicated plot—often in the form of an accompanying subplot—the adaptive text cuts and streamlines. Thus, the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern subplot of Hamlet disappears in Lamb’s retelling. Similarly, the number of characters—in, for instance, A Midsummer Night’s Dream—is reduced significantly so that the young reader might better keep track of the action. The goal of this sort of change is clear: to render the tale more easily comprehensible for young readers who might become lost among either too many characters or too many plot complications. A similar logic helps to determine the overall length of the retelling—though it is important to point out that publishers of adaptive texts have perhaps the most to say about the acceptable length of remediations of Shakespeare that they are willing to publish. In the case of the Lambs, their adaptations seem to have been limited by the nature of the Godwin’s Juvenile Library series to approximately five thousand words. Those problems that presented themselves in remediation that were not practical in nature (number of characters, complexity of plot, and so forth) were vexed issues indeed—and continue to be for remediators of

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Shakespeare’s plays for young readers. (I will note that no one offers adaptations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets —though perhaps one can well imagine adaptations of the narrative poems.) How might a writer who is adapting a Shakespeare play resolve the challenges in difficulty for young readers represented by the early modern English in which the plays are written? Or the poetry? Or those features of the plays we might group under the heading of “Shakespearean aesthetics”? Given the typically didactic or moral quality of remediations—and indeed, the question of the inevitability of such moral concerns is a topic for consideration below—we will also need to take note of the ways in which adaptive authors attend to and execute their moral concerns and objectives. For the Lambs, who it can be said set the model for subsequent retellings, the way this concern with the moral valence enters the tale is through the narrators’ attempts to shape readers’ reactions and understandings of the tales they are reading.

Execution The answers to these questions are offered in the various strategies of execution deployed by the writers of remediations; in the present case, this means those many decisions made by Charles and Mary Lamb as they encountered the many challenges and problems of the remediation process. Among these strategies I would like to identify three in particular, each of which addresses a particular set of problems of remediation: appropriateness of adaptive material, practical matters for the adaptive text, as well as the very great challenges represented by the need to grapple with Shakespeare’s language and poetry, and the issue of how exactly to present the tale so that it may achieve not only its own aesthetic objectives, but its moral ones as well. These three strategies—which are actually categories within which local tactics of remediations are articulated—are (1) Dilation, (2) Deletion, and (3) Deferral.27 All three of these types of adaptive strategies reveal both the politics and the poetics of remediation and are therefore key to our understanding of what a remediation is, how a remediation is created, and what a remediation can be said to mean. And all three types—Dilation, Deletion, and Deferral—are addressed in the Lambs’ Preface to their Tales from Shakespeare. I will begin with Dilation, the presence of which initially may seem perhaps counterintuitive: the tales are, after all, derived from their greater originals, a theme that runs throughout the Preface. But to begin with,

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the Preface itself is an example of dilation: it is some thing that is added to the Shakespeare play, or plays, in order to make the retellings successful. And this success depends to a great degree upon the remediations enabling reader apprehension and participation. We see a telling instance of this in the opening paragraph of the Preface: The following Tales are meant to be submitted to the young reader as an introduction to the study of Shakespeare, for which purpose his words are used whenever it seemed possible to bring them in; and in whatever has been added to give them the regular form of a connected story, diligent care has been taken to select such words as might least interrupt the effect of the beautiful English tongue in which he wrote: therefore, words introduced into our language since his time have been as far as possible avoided. (Tales , 1)

There are many things, in fact, that are interpolated into the Tales , this Preface demonstrates, that are not, strictly speaking, any part of Shakespeare’s works as such. These include the explicitly educative purpose supposed to underwrite the reading of the tales now, as well as the reading of Shakespeare later (more on this below). Also, this opening paragraph makes clear that the act of reading the tales, like the act of having remediated them, is a sustained linguistic exercise in which the histories of individual words are at stake in order to preserve the illusion of a Shakespearean “tongue.” At the same time, it is clear from these opening sentences that the process of remediation has required certain introjections of non-Shakespearean material—those features (which interestingly remain unnamed and unidentified in the Preface) that actually serve to reinvent the plays as prose narratives, what the Preface labels as changes to form and to language that have been added “to give [the tales] the regular form of a connected story.” This is a curious formulation—one that suggests perhaps that what one actually finds in Shakespeare is either irregular, when it comes to story, or so un-connected as not to constitute a story at all. And there are those nonShakespearean words that the retelling requires and for which the Lambs offer as substitutions—whenever possible—properly early modern English words that Shakespeare did not actually use in the local moments in question. While these comments and warnings about style both are themselves and actually point to further moments of dilation, the Preface also undertakes, through the following paragraphs to its conclusion, to dilate upon certain other features of the adaptations and the plays, all with the general aim of

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setting the parameters of what the young reader is to expect in the tales that follow and, even more significantly, how best to apprehend and understand those tales. To this end the Preface sketches an educative scenario that resides at its heart and reveals at least some of its most cherished goals for the tales and their readers. Noting that young boys will already have read Shakespeare because of their unfettered access to their fathers’ libraries, while their young sisters will not have had this experience, the Preface appeals to “the young gentlemen” for participation and assistance in explaining to their sisters such parts as are hardest for them to understand: and when they have helped them to get over the difficulties, then perhaps they will read to them (carefully selecting what is proper for a young sister’s ear) some passage which has pleased them in one of these stories, in the very words of the scene from which it is taken; and it is hoped they will find that the beautiful extracts, the select passages they may choose to give their sisters, in this way will be much better relished and understood from having some notion of the general story from one of these imperfect abridgments. … (Tales , 2)

Thus the scene of reading becomes an entire educative program, complete with the knowing young gentleman and the eager, if disadvantaged, younger sister in need of his help and guidance. Moreover, the scene also features the adaptations and the originals, with the former cast literally as primary and preliminary, and the latter as secondary. One effect of this scenario is something like the conflation of tale and play in a seamless program of reading and guidance that alone will suffice to bring the imagined young reader to a more complete apprehension of the Shakespeare experience. This is true, too, for both the young girl, who requires the help and guidance of the more mature and capable brother, and for the young gentleman, whose function as reader and guide can only be completed through the interactions with both the adapted and adaptive texts and with the young sister as developing reader. As this scenario, together with the other forms of Dilation enacted within the Preface, serve to suggest, the tales will depend heavily upon the introjections of non-Shakespearean elements in order for them to function properly. In the actual tales that follow the Preface, one of the most important and conspicuous forms that Dilation takes comes in the shape of explicit editorial intervention by the narrator and the appearance of equally explicit moral commentary—very like the conjured reading scenario just reviewed.

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The work of Deletion is more readily apparent in the Preface, and the individual tales, as is perhaps to be expected. We have already commented on the first mention of Deletion in the Preface, which refers to the loss of difficult or obscure words in the Shakespearean original (and their replacement by more appropriate substitutes). The second paragraph of the Preface expands upon this linguistic concern. The young reader will find, the Lambs write, that in the tragedies “Shakespeare’s own words, with little alteration, recur frequently in the narrative as well as in the dialogue.” But such is not, however, so often the case with the comedies, which—for reasons never wholly articulated—resist this treatment (this act of turning Shakespeare’s words “into narrative form”), with one result being the writers’ fear that “in them [the comedies], dialogue has been made use of too frequently for young people not accustomed to the dramatic form of writing” (Tales , 1). At this point in the Preface, the Lambs ask for the reader’s indulgence for having, in effect, turned Shakespeare’s comedies into something like extended dialogues, complete with “the ‘He said’ and ‘She said,’ the question and reply” that threatens to become “tedious” to their young readers’ ears. There is here a kind of wonderful confusion in which the comedies are identified as perhaps too much like “the dramatic form of writing” with which young readers will not be wholly familiar and that the retellings set out in some measure to replace. (There’s the further tension between “the dramatic form of writing” that the tales are trying not to be and the “‘He said’ and ‘She said’” proper to prose narratives, and the novel especially, to which the Tales bear certain formal similarities.) But these problems that arise from deletions the Lambs were more or less forced to make are (the Preface continues) a function of the very nature of remediation—which in this light seems always to be defined by a structural and inevitable inadequacy. To explain these facts of deletion and its many consequences, the Lambs invoke the Shakespearean originals. The compromise just discussed are to be forgiven (“they must pardon it”) because “it was the only way in which could be given to them a few hints and little foretastes of the great pleasures which awaits them in their elder years” (Tales , 1) when the young readers turn to Shakespeare. Infidelity is the price of fidelity. But the Lambs are clear in this that their tales are “small and valueless coins” extracted from Shakespeare that claim “no other merit than as faint and imperfect stamps of Shakespeare’s matchless image.” And this faintness and imperfection are the very consequences of deletion: “Faint and imperfect images they must be called, because the beauty of his language is too frequently destroyed by the necessity of changing many of his

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excellent words into words far less expressive of his true sense, to make it read something like prose” (Tales , 1). And the handy strategy of direct quotation (which is a mainstay of these retellings) provides no substantive help: and even in some few places, where his blank verse is given unaltered, as hoping from its simple plainness to cheat the young readers into the belief that they are reading prose, yet still his language being transplanted from its own natural soil and wild poetic garden, it must want much of its native beauty. (Tales , 1–2)

The ultimate resolution to the complications represented by both Dilation and Deletion are, we can say, resolved in the third type of remediation strategy: Deferral. Any shortcomings the Tales may have (and the Lambs readily admit to many) can and indeed will be redressed precisely upon the fulfillment of the great and overriding object of the retellings, a goal that can only be reached through the workings of Deferral: the young readers’ experience of reading the Shakespeare originals. The Tales will be successful remediations of (or introductions to and advertisements of) Shakespeare precisely because his plays are posited simultaneously as both the point of origin of the retellings and as their final destinations. If the tales have managed to delight their young readers, Charles Lamb writes, “it is hoped that no worse effect will result than to make them wish themselves a little older, that they may be allowed to read the Plays at full length (such a wish will be neither peevish nor irrational).” He continues, taking direct aim at both prompting a judicious assessment of the adaptations and their necessary limitations that he believes the full plays will engender, and at the great and transformative powers of the Shakespeare plays themselves: “When time and leave of judicious friends shall put them into their hands, they will discover in such of them as are here abridged (not to mention almost as many more, which are left here untouched) many surprising events and turns of fortune, which for their infinite variety could not be contained in this little book. …” And this leads to Lamb’s concluding paragraph (which we have sampled earlier in this discussion) that represents not only the expected fulfillment of the politics and poetics of deferral, but at the same time stands as one particularly striking example of the moral commentary that characterizes so much of what we read in the Tales from Shakespeare:

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What these Tales shall have been to the young readers, that and much more it is the writers’ wish that the true Plays of Shakespeare may prove to them in older years—enrichers of the fancy, strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all sweet and honourable thoughts and actions, to teach courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity: for of examples, teaching these virtues, his pages are full. (Tales , 2)

In the next chapter I turn to one of the Tales from Shakespeare in particular: Charles Lamb’s retelling of King Lear. This tale, as Jean Marsden argues, “represents the aims of the Tales as a whole: they are shaped to appeal to a specific audience, and, through the use of good and bad examples, they teach this audience an acceptable code of behavior” (Marsden, 60). At the same time, Lamb’s version of Lear demonstrates Dilation, Deletion, and Deferral in action and provides an ideal “specimen” text to map their uses and deployments.

Notes 1. Charles Lamb, “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation,” in The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 3 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons; London: Methuen & Co., 1903; rpt., New York: AMS Press, 1968), 1: 97–111, 97. 2. Pratt produced another poem on the subject of Garrick’s death: “The Shadows of Shakespeare: A Monody, occasioned by the Death of Mr. Garrick” (Bath, 1779). This poem begins with news of Garrick’s death having reached the poet, who quickly retreats to the study (“holy Solitude”) in order to work in silence on his poetic response to the shocking and shattering fact: “And is he dead, whose wonder-working art/ So often tone, and touch’d, and tun’d the heart?/ Whose piercing eye intelligence could give,/ And bid long-buried beings look and live?” (p. 7). Here we see again the power of Garrick’s acting to resurrect; but, as the poem proceeds, it is Pratt’s poem that manifests the ability to conjure both supernatural spirits and the spirits of the dead to rise again. We encounter first Melpomene and Thalia and Fancy (“Th’inspiring Goddess”). The Muse of Tragedy is first on the scene: “Melpomene came on,/ Afflicted for her Son,/ And thrice, methought, the BOWL she lifted high,/ And thrice she threw on Heaven the pity-moving eye;/ Then, like the statue of Despair,/ Stood fix’d—her DAGGER pois’d in air” (pp. 9–10). Then Thalia, who throws away her mask and repudiates both comedy and even the poetry of mourning: “Away with leisure’s coxcomb line,/ The couplet quaint, the stanza

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fine;/ Far from our verse be now the pun, the point,/ The period measur’d joint by joint;/ Th’elaborate trade of poesy forbear—/ O rather paint the workings of despair;/ Scorn the vain edging sable Verse assumes,/ And let dark Elegy pass on, in all her pompous plumes” (pp. 10–11). Instead, Thalia calls upon a more able voice: “SHAKESPEARE HIMSELF, who best our state can feel,/ Shall the sad tale in his own language tell” (p. 11). Fancy (“With all her magic arm’d” [p. 11]) approaches and together with the speaker of the poem “the drear Abbey walk’d around” (p. 12). This walk leads to Garrick’s monument and then, the speaker says, “As at the foot of mighty SHAKESPEARE’S tomb,” he perceives through the gloom “Innumerous SHADY FORMS” that form a procession that wends its way to “GARRICK’S grave” (pp. 12–13). The speaker soon recognizes the “shady forms” as “the TRAIN/ OF SHAKESPEARE” as each figure in turn “his hallow’d homage paid” (p. 13) to Garrick’s tomb. The poem gives us Ariel and Prospero, the Weird Sisters, Romeo, Coriolanus, Lear, Macbeth, Antony, “a female form, of PERCY’S line” (p. 20), Jacques, Hamlet, and finally Shakespeare himself. Not all of these spirits speak: Ariel, for her part, “stood mute,/ The gaz’d upon the grave,—then sunk in sighs” (p. 14) and the Weird Sisters, on the other hand, speak, but do so incomprehensibly: “The weir’d Sisters then, hag-born and horrid,/ Mutter’d their melancholy homage hoarse,” cry “Cold distillations of distress extreme,” and pace around the “hallow’d earth,/ Acknowledging their Lord” (p. 15). But when the spirits do speak intelligibly—and even though they are meant evidently to speak in Shakespeare’s “own language”—offer indeed a farrago, speaking lines Pratt himself improvises. Thus Romeo, who comes to sound like Othello: The gentle ROMEO was the third which came; And oh! he said,—‘Turn back dull Earth—ah, me! Can I go forward when my friend is here? It is even so—Then I defy you stars! Romeo shall never more be Romeo now His occupation’s gone. (p. 16) Or Macbeth, who sounds closer to Hamlet: Oh Nature! how thyself thou blazon’dst In this thy Son; form’d in thy prodigality To hold thy mirror up, and give the time Its very form and pressure .… (p. 19)

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Or Jacques, who seems in part to be a counterfeit Macbeth: Why all the World’s a stage, And all the Men and Women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And this MAN, in his time, play’d many parts. Life! No more on’t; it is a tale, told By an idiot, signifying nothing. (pp. 21–22) And Lear, who enters crowned with “nettles, cuckoo flowers,/ Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow/ In the sustaining corn,” whose lines manifest a certain madness beyond, perhaps, what Shakespeare had imagined: You do me wrong to call me out o’th’grave! And yet I know thee, Man!—Heav’n has thee now! Thou wer’t Lear’s friend.—In faith I do remember.— Yes, we were both as stout a pair:—but why This truant disposition? Is the greatest man So poor and forked an animal in death?— Off, off, you lendings, come unbotton here—Poor shade! No more of that, no more of that. (pp. 18–19) 3. Tales from Shakespeare—a work (I am tempted to call it a “phenomenon”) that has never been out of print since its first publication in 1807—stands in many ways as the prototypic and, perhaps, the measure for all subsequent prose remediations of Shakespeare intended for young readers. All quotations from this work are from The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E.V. Lucas, 3 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons; London: Methuen & Co., 1903; rpt., New York: AMS Press, 1968), vol. 3. There is an important, and growing, body of critical literature that addresses the Tales —and remediations of Shakespeare for young readers more generally. Among these works, see Amy Scott-Douglass, “Shakespeare for Children,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts, eds. Mark Thornton Burnett, Adrian Streete, and Ramona Wray (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 349–76; Erica Hateley, Shakespeare in Children’s Literature: Gender and Cultural Capital (New York and London: Routledge, 2009); Kate Chedgzoy, Susanne Greenhalgh, and Robert Shaughnessy, eds., Shakespeare and Childhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Stephanie S. Gearhart, “‘Faint and Imperfect Stamps’: The Problem with Adaptations of Shakespeare for Children,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 27 (2007): 44–67; Georgianna Ziegler, “Introducing Shakespeare: The Earliest Versions for Children,” Shakespeare 2/2: 2006,

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132–51; Felicity James, “‘Wild Tales’ from Shakespeare: Reading Charles and Mary Lamb,” Shakespeare 2/2: 2006: 152–67; Kathryn Prince, “Illustration, Text, and Performance in Early Shakespeare for Children,” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/2 (2006); Winifred Yin, “The Lambs’ ‘Chapbook’ Tales from Shakespeare: Following Foxon’s Footsteps Further,” The Book Collector 53/4 (2004): 542–58); Naomi J. Miller, ed. Reimaging Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults (New York and London: Routledge, 2003); Winifred Yin, “Textual Basis of Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare,” Charles Lamb Bulletin, n.s. 120 (2002): 124–33; Charles H. Frey, “A Brief History of Shakespeare as Children’s Literature,” New Review of Children’s Literature and Librarianship 7/1 (2001): 147–56; Stanley Wells, “Tales from Shakespeare,” Proceedings from the British Academy 73 (1987), 12–52; Jonathan Bate, “Lamb on Shakespeare,” Charles Lamb Bulletin, n.s. 51 (1985): 76–85. The work represented in these—among many other—pieces of criticism lend support and ballast to the sentiment offered by Susanne Greenhalgh (“Introduction: Reinventing Shakespearean Childhoods,” in Chedgzoy, Greenhalgh, and Shaughnessy, 117–36) that the study of Shakespeare for young readers indeed constitutes a vibrant emergent area of new work: [T]he ‘rewriting’ and ‘reimaging’ of Shakespeare for the young, together with the incorporation of children and child references into the textual, artistic and performance history of the plays, does indeed provide a promising seam for future critical investigation and research. Attention to this interplay of generational performances, perceptions and politics confirms that the reinvention of Shakespeare for children is a fascinating and significant aspect of Shakespeare studies, and one that has much to reveal about the hopes and anxieties that continue to circulate around childhood. (Greenhalgh, 132)

4. In her Introduction to the Penguin edition of Tales from Shakespeare (London: Penguin Books, 2007), Marina Warner identifies what I take to be a complementary cause of this anti-theatricalism: the “supreme value” accorded the “inward eye” by the Romantics: The concept of ‘seeing with eyes shut’ pulses under some Romantic interpretations of Shakespeare, both verbal and visual: the inner eye could see into the insubstantial pageants summoned in the plays by reading the words on the page; their conjuring could surpass in intensity any staging and production and dramatizing in the theatre, for imagination could dream and invent independently and interpret more faithfully the poet’s vision. (Warner, xiii)

5. To discuss what I am calling here Lamb’s “anti-theatricalism” is not to argue that Lamb was an enemy of theater. As Felicity James writes in an

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indispensible essay on Lamb, “His essay knowingly poses paradoxical questions to the reader, not least because of the way it seems as odds with his own fondness for theatre-going and actors.” James also reminds us that Lamb was himself the author of “four largely unsuccessful plays—the first written in 1799, the last in 1828—he persisted in attempting to have his work staged, despite having his only production, Mr. H —, hissed on its first night” (Felicity James, “Charles Lamb,” in Lamb, Hazlitt, Keats: The Great Shakespeareans, Vol. IV, ed. Adrian Poole [London and New York: Continuum, 2010), 10–64, 17. For a general consideration of Lamb and his relation to the theater, see Wayne McKenna, Charles Lamb and the Theater (New York: Harper & Row, 1978). 6. See also Lamb’s short piece, “Shakespeare Improvers,” which appeared in The Spectator in 1828, in which Lamb identifies “certain kindred enormities” that correspond to the “sickly stuff interplolated by Tate in the genuine play of King Lear”—remediations that were “perpetrated upon the dramas of Shakspeare,” including (among several others), Tate’s version of Coriolanus: I speak from imperfect recollections of one of these new versions which I have seen, namely, Coriolanus —by the same hand which touched up King Lear; in which he, the said Nahum, not deeming his author’s catastrophe enough striking, makes Aufidius (if my memory fail me not) violate the person of the wife, and mangle the body of the little son, of his Roman rival! (Works, 1: 321–22)

7. Falstaff’s Letters was originally published in London in 1796; quotations in this discussion are from a later reprint, published under the title Falstaff’s Letters by James White, Originally Published in 1796 and Now Reprinted Verbatim and Literatum, with Notices of the Author Collected from Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt and Other Contemporaries (London, 1877), cited as (FL, page number). For important studies of Falstaff’s Letters see T. W. Craik, “Jem White and Falstaff’s Letters ,” Charles Lamb Bulletin 91 (1995): 118–29; David Chandler, “Charles Lamb, James White, Shakespeare’s Papers, and John Warburton’s Cook,” Doshisha Studies in English 78 (2005): 1–25; and David Chandler, “Lamb, Falstaff’s Letters , and Landor’s Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare,” Charles Lamb Bulletin 131 (2005): 76–85. 8. Robert Southey, Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, vol. vi (London, 1850), 286–87, qtd. in FL, xxi. 9. For discussions of the Ireland forgeries, see S. Schoenbaum’s discussion in Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Kathryn Johnson and Greg Buzwell, “‘Tis mad idolatry’: Vortigern, the Ireland Forgeries and the Birth of Bardolatry,” in Shakespeare in Ten Acts, eds. Gordon McMullan and Zoë Wilcox (London: The British Library, 2016),

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101–19; Tom Lockwood, “Manuscript, Print and the Authentic Shakespeare: The Ireland Forgeries Again,” Shakespeare Survey 59 (2006): 108–23; see also, Jeffrey Kahan, Reforging Shakespeare: The Story of a Theatrical Scandal (Cranbury, CT: Associated University Presses, 1998). For an interesting contemporary response, offered as a parody (and one that invokes the ghost of Shakespeare) see G. M. Woodward, Familiar Verses, from the Ghost of Willy Shakespeare to Sammy Ireland (London, 1796)—a poem that includes the following striking passage: Then, know, my Friend, to ease thy troubled mind, They WILLY’s GHOST, to thee was always kind; And, far from judging the old writings found, Said to be mine, so long in darkness bound, I’ll not pretend the mystic veil to draw— Pronounce them forg’d, or pass them into law; To speak the truth, I give it on my word; For years long past, my Muse has felt the sword,-Such hackings, slashings, cutting here and there, Some parts press’d down, and others puff’d to air; That I make oath, and swear it on the spot, I know not what is mine, nor what is not. (Woodward, 10–11) 10. In his essay “Falstaff in Miniature: James White’s Original Letters of Sir John Falstaff … 1796,” The Charles Lamb Bulletin, n.s. 72 (1990): 265–76, Reginald Watters aptly describes the language of the dedication as “hybrid prose, part-Chaucer, part-King James Bible, part-Chatterton” and, further, a “pastiche of pastiche” (267). Watters’s essay provides a careful, detailed, and useful discussion of the Falstaff letters, which for Watters never finally “grow into full dramatic action or full novelistic absurdity.” In the end, they remain, he continues, “word-products, gentle flights of fancy, dream children” (Watters, 271). 11. This reviewer also offers praise for the abilities of imitation manifest in the letters for the author’s “considerable talents for humour, with a good deal of ingenuity in imitating the language and manners of characters sketched out by our great dramatist.” But the praise is tempered, as it were, by the realization that imitations are inevitably at times flawed: “Not that it would be difficult frequently to catch him tripping in an expression, or a circumstance, not belonging to the assumed period; but where the purpose is only a laugh, there is no need for criticism to look so narrowly” (ix). 12. Alfred Ainger, ed., The Works of Charles Lamb, 12 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1900), vol. 3, xv.

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13. Ziegler (note 3, above) situates early retellings of Shakespeare for children within the context of conflicting eighteenth-century understandings of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Some Thoughts Concerning Education: “It is against this background of Lockean ideas interpreted leniently or strictly and the rise of education for the lower middle classes, that the development of versions of Shakespeare for children should be viewed” (Ziegler, 134). 14. The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. Edwin W. Marrs, Jr., 3 vols. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), 2: 81. 15. For Felicity James (note 3, above), the “wildness” at stake for Lamb and manifest in Tales from Shakespeare “takes on an important educational and moral role” (154). James continues: The ‘wildness’ of the Tales is a contested, divided concept, which I want to consider from several different perspectives: it is invested with political and religious implications for the Lambs and their publishers, the Godwins; it reflects anxieties over female reading and behaviour; and it has special personal significance for the Lambs themselves, constantly aware of the dangers of insanity. (James, 155)

16. Felicity James (note 5, above) comments on this attraction for Lamb of the “wild tales,” which she sees at stake elsewhere in Lamb’s works (in his Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived in the Time of Shakespeare [1808], for instance]) as well as in the Tales . In both, this interest in the “wild” is combined with an educational impulse: “As we saw in the Specimens, the desire to structure and control might be an integral part of the Tales , whose imaginative ‘wildness’ seems inextricably intertwined with their didactic element. … The concept of the ‘wild’ has, therefore, an important educational and moral role, subtly enforced” (James, “Charles Lamb,” 53). 17. Jean I. Marsden, “Shakespeare for Girls: Mary Lamb and Tales from Shakespeare,” Children’s Literature 17 (1989): 47–63, p. 50. 18. For her part, Mary Lamb appears similarly interested in laying credit where it is due. In letter to Sarah Stoddart (30 May–2 June 1806) she identifies those tales that Charles had written or was then writing, and the sketches the collaborative, and companionate, writing scene: Charles has written Macbeth & Othello, King Lear & has begun Hamlet. you would like to see us as we often sit writing on one table (but not on one cushion sitting) like Hermia & Helena in the Midsummer’s Nights Dream. or rather like an old literary Darby and Joan. I taking snuff & he groaning all the while & saying he can make nothing of it, which he always says till he has finished and then he finds out he has made something of it. (Marrs, 2: 228–29)

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19. Charles and Mary Lamb, Tales from Shakespeare, in The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 3 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons; London: Methuen & Co., 1903; rpt., New York: AMS Press, 1968), 3: 2. Marsden offers a parallel passage from Hannah More on the proper education of girls and the role proper reading can play in it: “She is to read the best books, not so much to enable her to talk of them, as to bring the improvement which they furnish, to the rectification of her principles and the formation of her habits” (Hannah More, The Complete Works of Hannah More, 2 vols. [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1836], I, 363), quoted in Marsden, 51. 20. For a useful discussion of the illustrations, see Winifred Yin, “The Lambs’ ‘Chapbook’ Tales from Shakespear” (note 3, above). 21. The “bad baby” was Godwin’s second wife, Mary Jane Godwin. As Marina Warner points out, though, “it was probably this bad baby who suggested the children’s publishing venture to Godwin and became its driving force, taking up the pedagogical legacy of the family with energy and flair as she strove to restore the Godwins’ extremely precarious finances” (Warner, xvi). 22. Kathryn Prince (note 3, above) discusses the ways in which the “presence” of the theater and the stage continue to inform children’s versions of Shakespeare specifically through illustration. For Prince, this is true of the illustrations that appear in the first edition of Tales : “Even within the pages of Tales from Shakespeare, despite its anti-theatrical orientation, the stage crept in through illustrations featuring tableaux of famous scenes, reminiscent of the juvenile drama and of in-character portraits that were increasingly used to advertise both actors and productions in the nineteenth century” (Prince, 7). 23. In her list of “decisive steps” taken by the Lambs in their “translations” of Shakespeare’s plays “into accessible form for young readers,” Warner identifies the decision to “abandon Shakespeare’s nested chronologies, and unravel the sequence of events to begin at the beginning of the story and go on to the end.” She identifies, too, the introduction of narrators, illustrating the point with the Charles Lamb’s retelling of Hamlet : Positioning the narrative voice outside the action, an omniscient and confiding guide takes the reader through Shakespeare’s plots towards evaluating his characters and sympathizing with them: Hamlet’s antic disposition now has a clear motive and a good cause. Gone is the puzzlement from our minds about him; when Hamlet suffers his doubts and torments, we know he is justified. (Warner, xviii–xix)

24. Other critics have of course pointed to the presence of narrators in Tales . Hilary Newman, in “The Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s Plays,” Charles Lamb Bulletin, n.s. 141 (2008): 20–28, for instance, identifies the presence of narrators as central to the differences between drama

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and prose narratives: “Unlike literary art, drama is acted out, rather than told by a narrator.” However, Newman collapses another distinction upon which I would like to insist: the distinction between the Lambs and the narrators of the Tales . “Thus in a play nobody stands between the audience and the characters, whereas in the Lambs’ retelling of the plays as prose tales, they are narrators who come between the characters and the reader” (Newman, 21). 25. For an alternate view of the consequences of the presence of narrators in the Tales (with a special focus on Charles Lamb’s “Macbeth,” see Hateley (note 3, above): As a model of adaptation, the Lambs’ text reveals both overt and covert moralising, interpretation disguised as abridgement, and the forcing of a unilateral meaning onto both the play and the designated audience. The third-person narrative is constructed so specifically as omniscient that no character is allowed to function as focaliser, either to offer an alternative perspective on events, or to offer the reader an opportunity to critique the authorial position. This appropriation of Macbeth, under the guise of simplistic retelling, actually recasts the play as a specifically moral fable, enforcing contemporary understanding of gender, education, and reading as timeless and authoritative. (Hateley, 32)

26. William Shakespeare, Hamlet , eds. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson, 2006), 1.5.40–41. 27. Stanley Wells’s (note 3, above) perhaps less sympathetic terms/notions are quite different in nature: “Along with omission and reduction,” he writes of the Tales, “there is also a little elaboration” (Wells, 128).

CHAPTER 5

Lamb’s Lear

By the time Charles Lamb came to write his “King Lear” in the opening years of the nineteenth century, there had been no fewer than three distinct versions of Shakespeare’s play on the stage (and in print) for several decades—no one of which in fact was wholly by William Shakespeare.1 As will become clear in the following discussion, adapting Shakespeare’s play was such a common—indeed we might say, standard—practice that Shakespeare’s Lear plays (both the Q1 and the F versions) were all but lost or invisible for nearly two centuries. This is especially the case when we consider staged versions of Lear. This tradition of adapting King Lear begins with Nahum Tate’s The History of King Lear in 1681. Tate’s project was to provide Restoration audiences a version of King Lear more closely aligned with their aesthetic tastes and preferences. Having said this, I hasten to add that this work required no small amount of effort or ingenuity. And although Tate’s King Lear has long since become notorious as an object of nearly universal contempt (James Black, the editor of the Regents Restoration Drama edition of the play notes that it “may claim to be one of the most famous unread plays in English; it is unique in having attracted a special kind of word-ofmouth ridicule, with the result that ‘the King Lear with the happy ending’ has long had far more critics than readers”), such was not always the case. In point of fact, Tate’s adaptation of Lear was so successful and evidently so pleasing to theater audiences (and even to readers) that it managed to © The Author(s) 2019 H. Marchitello, Remediating Shakespeare in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22837-8_5

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displace its greater original for more than 150 years.2 James Black is not alone in suggesting that “part of Tate’s ‘offense’ is that his version, and revisions of it, kept Shakespeare’s from the stage for a century and a half” (History, xv). If readers today know anything of Tate’s “unread” play, they know that it is (as Black wrote) “the King Lear with the happy ending,” the very mention of which is typically enough to insure both contempt and the wholesale dismissal of the play; how, after all, can there be a tragedy with a happy ending? But this question ignores two crucial facts. First, the happy tragedy (if I can use the phrase) was not unknown to Tate’s period—nor was it, for that matter, unknown to Shakespeare’s: as I will discuss below, the story of Lear inspired a stage version, the anonymous tragicomedy The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir and His Three Daughters .3 As James Black reminds us, “there was a recognized place on the Augustan literary scene for plays where virtue was rewarded as well as villainy punished—a place for ‘tragedies’ with happy endings” (History, xxvii); and no less an authority than Dr. Johnson approved of Tate’s alteration to the ending of Lear.4 Secondly, late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century readers and critics tended to find the deaths of Cordelia and Lear unbearable—or, as Black writes, these readers “found the tragic ending too painful.” He continues, Eighteenth-century critics repeatedly endorsed Tate’s ending. … [E]ven critics who knew both Shakespeare’s and Tate’s plays had good things to say about the happy ending. Charles Gildon, writing in no less a place than Rowe’s 1710 edition of Shakespeare, says that ‘the King and Cordelia ought by no means to have dy’d, and therefore Mr. Tate has very justly altered that particular, which must disgust the reader and audience to have virtue and piety meet so unjust a reward.’ (History, xxvi)5

But in the long history of adaptations of the Lear story, the happy ending of Tate’s version—in which Cordelia lives and Lear is restored to the throne—is actually normative; it is Shakespeare’s devastatingly tragic conclusion, complete with Cordelia’s murder and Lear’s broken-hearted death, that is the exception to the rule. In fact, of all the Lear retellings, from Geoffrey of Monmouth through Spenser and beyond, only Shakespeare’s refuses the happy ending. In other words, the survival of Cordelia and the restoration of Lear do not themselves render Tate’s adaptation contemptible; they make it perfectly conventional. And they render it un-Shakespearean.

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The far more unconventional transformation Tate offers in his version—setting aside for the moment his rewriting of Shakespeare’s verse—is his introduction of a love plot featuring Cordelia and Edgar that culminates in their marriage that, as Edgar’s final lines that close the play attest, also settles the question of the eventual succession (an issue on which Shakespeare himself seems to have had some second thoughts): Our drooping country now erects her head, Peace spreads her balmy wings, and Plenty blooms. Divine Cordelia, all the gods can witness How much thy love to empire I prefer! Thy bright example shall convince the world (Whatever storms of Fortune are decreed) That truth and virtue shall at last succeed. (History, 5.6.154–60)

Readers of Shakespeare’s Lear will be profoundly surprised by this love story engineered between these two characters who, in Shakespeare’s play, do not even share a single scene together. Tate of course was well aware of this fact and actually refers to it when in his dedicatory letter (addressed to Thomas Boteler) he explains his decision to add the love plot: ’Twas my good fortune to light on one expedient to rectify what was wanting in the regularity and probability of the tale, which was to run through the whole a love betwixt Edgar and Cordelia, that never changed word with each other in the original. This renders Cordelia’s indifference and her father’s passion in the first scene probable. It likewise gives countenance to Edgar’s disguise, making that a generous design that was before a poor shift to save his life. The distress of the story is evidently heightened by it; and it particularly gave occasion of a new scene or two, of more success (perhaps) than merit. (History, 1–2)

Tate’s decision to insert the love plot seems to have been for him something of a rescue mission and derives from his sense that Shakespeare’s Lear as he found it, though it had striking moments, was so damaged by a thorough-going disorderedness that the play was finally an artistic failure: “I found the whole,” he writes to Boteler, “to answer your account of it, a heap of jewels, unstrung and unpolished, yet so dazzling in their disorder that I soon perceived I had seized a treasure” (History, 1). Having at the outset of his letter professed a great “zeal for all the remains of Shakespeare” (and thereby signaling his participation in the discourse of

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mortality and monumentality discussed in Chapter 2), and noting as well how “bold an undertaking” it would be to attempt his “revival … with alterations” (History, 1), Tate nevertheless musters the courage (if that is the word) to rewrite the play, including his most significant “alteration,” the love plot. But adding the love between Edgar and Cordelia produced great consequences for his History—not least the fact that it introduces a certain generic complexity (not to say confusion) into the play, or the fact that this love plot serves also to change the characters involved as he had them from Shakespeare: while for Tate the love plot resolves Shakespeare’s problems with “regularity and probability,” for us it produces a substantially altered Cordelia and a significantly different Edgar. The love plot, moreover, required not only a whole set of changes to these characters and their plots (in Tate, for example, Cordelia does not flee to France, as the King of France has been eliminated from the play in order to make room for the new Edgar), but also necessitated Tate’s writing of entirely new (that is, non-Shakespearean) scenes for his play, which I will address later in this chapter. For the moment, it is important, though not surprising, that Tate’s work as remediator meant at many moments he also worked as reviser, especially of Shakespeare’s language and verse. This begins with Tate’s very opening speech, given to the character called Bastard (as Edmund is indeed identified by Shakespeare’s speech prefixes in both Q1 and F), and relocated from its 1.2 location in Shakespeare’s play: Thou, Nature, art my goddess: to thy law My services are bound. Why am I then Deprived of a son’s right because I came not In the dull road that custom has prescribed? Why bastard, wherefore base, when I can boast A mind as gen’rous and shape as true As honest madam’s issue? Why are we Held base, who in the lusty stealth of nature Take fiercer qualities than what compound The scanted births of the stale marriage-bed? Well then, legitimate Edgar, to thy right Of law I will oppose a bastard’s cunning. Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund As to legitimate Edgar. With success I’ve practiced yet on both their easy natures. Here comes the old man chafed with th’information

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Which last I forged against my brother Edgar: A tale so plausible, so boldly uttered, As heightened by such lucky accidents That now the slightest circumstance confirms him, And base-born Edmund spite of law inherits. (History, 1.1.1–20)6

In order to illustrate the nature of Tate’s adaptive work as reviser, we can compare the foregoing speech with its corresponding—or rather, its source—speech in Shakespeare’s Lear: Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law My services are bound. Wherefore should I Stand in the plague of custom and permit The curiosity of nations to deprive me? For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines Lag of a brother? Why bastard? Wherefore base? When my dimensions are as well compact, My mind as generous and my shape as true As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us With base, with baseness, bastardy? Base, base? Who in the lusty stealth of nature take More composition and fierce quality Than doth within a dull stale tired bed Go to the creating of a whole tribe of fops Got ’tween a sleep and wake. Well, then, Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land. Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund As to the legitimate. Fine word, ‘legitimate’! Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed And my invention thrive, Edmund the base Shall top the legitimate. I grow, I prosper: Now gods, stand up for bastards!7

The strictly literary differences between these two speeches are in plain sight; Tate is not as accomplished a poet as was Shakespeare. At the same time, other differences obtain as well, most importantly, I would suggest, is the fact that Tate’s speech reads rather like a report or an abstract of Shakespeare’s. We might even go another step and say that Tate’s is, indeed, a summary of the essence of Shakespeare’s speech and as such has left out what we might want to call the psychology of the character altogether. It is clear (to put this another way) that Tate is working from a source text

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and as a consequence the speech he writes bears the signs of the great burden of something like fidelity to the main thrust of the speech: Tate wants to represent Shakespeare’s speech where Shakespeare wants to represent Edmund’s. Tate works from a source, while Shakespeare, we can say, works more from his imagination. Such reduction of thought to the representation of thought stands as one of the great obstacles to successful remediation. This comparison of one moment in the two plays may indeed stand as representative of Tate’s work as reviser of Shakespeare’s language. But this does not entirely prepare us for Tate’s work as “inventor” of Shakespearean language—and what emerges once we turn to consider whole speeches or entire scenes that are completely Tate’s is the specter that arises in the Bastard’s speech in History: forgery. There are, of course, many such instances in Tate’s play. He offers us a series of scenes not found in Shakespeare’s play, including (among others) the following: 3.4: a scene in which “Ruffians” hired by Edmund surprise Cordelia (and her attendant Arante) upon the heath with orders to steal Cordelia into Edmund’s clutches: “Then to th’field,/ Where like the vig’rous Jove I will enjoy/ This Semele in a storm. ’Twill deaf her cries/ Like drums in battle, lest her groans should pierce/ My pitying ear, and make the amorous fight less fierce” (History, 3.2.120–24); 4.1: a “grotto” scene in which Edmund and Regan, “amorously seated” (History, 4.1.0 SD) exchange professions of love and remembrances of each other: Regan offers a ring and Edmund a miniature portrait of himself: “And let this happy image of your Gloster,/ Lodge in that breast where all his treasure lies” (History, 4.1.21–22); and a number of scenes in which we learn of the uprisings by the peasant in response to the tyrannies of Regan and Goneril: Regan’s officer reports the news: At last day’s public festival, to which The yeomen from all quarters had repaired, Old Gloster, whom you late deprived of sight (His veins yet streaming fresh), presents himself, Proclaims your cruelty, and their oppression, With the king’s injuries; which so enraged ’em That now that mutiny which long had crept Takes wing, and threatens your best powers. (History, 4.1.37–44)

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And in 5.1 we learn that Kent has assumed command of the mutiny and the battle nears: We have, and were surprised to find The banished Kent returned, and at their head; Your brother Edgar on the rear; old Gloster (A moving spectacle) led through their ranks, Whose powerful tongue, and more prevailing wrongs, Have so enraged their rustic spirits that with Th’approaching dawn we must expect their battle. (History, 5.1.14–20)

And the play’s final scene (5.6) includes the rescue of Cordelia and Lear from the assassins—sent in this play by Gonerill and not Edmund: Edgar, together with the Duke of Albany, enters the prison at the moment of Lear’s killing of two of the assassins (to the one he manages to kill in Shakespeare’s play) and liberates the captives: “Death! Hell! Ye vultures, hold your impious hands,/ Or take a speedier death than you would give” (History, 5.6.34–35). Tate’s additions constitute but one of his major changes or innovations; his play is equally interesting for its deletions as for its dilations: the elimination of the King of France, which is required in order that Edgar can assume the role of Cordelia’s lover—and that at the same time requires the radical revision of the battle from a French-led invasion to a domestic mutiny arising from the lower ranks of society in direct reaction to what is cast as political (and not just the domestic) tyranny of Gonerill and Regan; the elimination of Oswald and his replacement by a functionary called simply “Officer.” But the chief and most significant of Tate’s deletions are the wholesale elimination of Lear’s Fool—a choice that seems to have been all but dictated by Restoration dramatic expectations and aesthetics: Restoration audiences would have recognized the Fool only as some sort of Harlequin; in an age when the ‘action’ of a play was especially stressed, they would have asked, Just what does the Fool do? In Shakespeare’s play he is Lear’s conscience, and fosters his master’s realization of error and folly. But in Tate’s version Lear is not guilty to the same extent that he is in Shakespeare; neither is there a gradual apprehension on his part that his daughters have misled him. Since Tate’s play races swiftly to the outbursts against Gonerill and Regan without Lear’s noticing ‘a most faint neglect of late,’ and without his growing conception of error—‘I did her wrong’—the Fool would have no function. (History, xx)

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But for all of these changes and their consequences and effects, there is nothing so thoroughly Shakespearean in this remediation than story retelling, since this is Shakespeare’s preferred practice. King Lear is, after all, a remediation of its source texts, especially the anonymous tragicomedy King Leir. Indeed, in many ways, King Lear provides us an especially privileged look into Shakespeare’s compositional practices, particularly as they relate to his relationship to the source material and the profoundly creative ways in which he manages to transform those earlier texts (or portions of them) to fulfill his own aesthetic purposes. Shakespeare’s adaptation of the anonymous play King Leir displays his adaptive powers at their best. He takes the Leir play—together with the Lear legends and stories found in other iterations—and reinvents what, in the anonymous play at least, is a credible, if workman-like, dramatic piece and transforms the story in the process into one of the language’s greatest and most enduring tragedies. While this story of Shakespeare’s reimagining of King Leir is well known enough to obviate the need here for its exhaustive rehearsal, it is nevertheless important to offer a few highlights of Shakespeare’s transformative adaptive work.8 Shakespeare’s Lear eliminates the figure of the evil counselor, Scalliger, together with all references to the dead queen and the consequence of her absence for the daughters and the king. The three daughters in King Leir are unmarried at the start of the play, unlike in Shakespeare’s where the eldest two are already married before the play begins. The love test is Lear’s idea in Shakespeare, unlike in Leir where it is the evil counselor’s idea. Shakespeare’s play introduces the key figure of the Fool; Shakespeare also introduces important changes to the Goneril and Regan figures. Shakespeare also eliminates the overtly Judeo-Christian ethos of the earlier play and replaces it with the more historically accurate—if problematical—paganism of his own invention. Shakespeare also deletes the king’s voyage to France and the heavy dependence upon disguises (the offer of the robe exchange in Leir becomes Lear’s iconic “lendings” moment). Similarly, Shakespeare’s equally momentous dilation transforms the pair of thunderclaps in Leir into the great storm on the heath. And Shakespeare’s most elaborate dilation is his introduction of the entire Gloucester plot (out of Sidney) that both offers its own entire narrative and at the same time is interwoven into the fabric of the main plot of the play. All of these transformations to the Leir play are well known and, as suggested, help to shed light on Shakespeare’s creative practices. At the same time, the figure of Shakespeare as remediator of texts that we have in part as a consequence of his reinvention of King Leir also leads on to

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the figure of Shakespeare as adapter of Shakespeare—and Lear is, once again, a particularly privileged point of entry into this discussion. Indeed, it is literally upon Shakespeare’s two Lear plays that this new figure has emerged. As many critics have argued over the last 30 years or so, the traditional designation of Q1 Lear as a compromised text, even though it also includes some 300 lines not found in the Folio version (which for its part includes some 100 lines not found in the Q1 text)—lines that have for two centuries been interpolated into the conflated King Lear—is no longer tenable. In place, then, of the clearly hypothetical—and, strictly and importantly, the non-Shakespearean conflated text—we now have two authentic plays: the Q1 play—True Chronicle History of the life and death of King Lear and his three Daughters, With the unfortunate life of Edgar, sonne and heire to the Earle of Gloster, and his sullen and assumed humor of Tom of Bedlam (1608)—and the Folio text—The Tragedie of King Lear (1623).9 Even as Tate’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Lear should come as no surprise as a critical and creative activity (though certainly some of its features may indeed continue to surprise us, even today), so Shakespeare’s remediation of King Leir and his other source texts does not entirely surprise. Indeed, given Shakespeare’s heavy reliance throughout his career on precisely the reinvention of prior texts and stories, remediation is the standard operating procedure for Shakespeare and in important ways helps to define the nature of his creative work. There are very few instances across Shakespeare’s oeuvre when he seems not to be working from the source material—when he is not, that is, writing an adaptation. And as this book has argued throughout, there is hardly a more properly Shakespearean action that a writer might undertake than offering to remediate Shakespeare. It is in this spirit that Charles and Mary Lamb (as we saw in the previous chapter) embarked on the first narrative retellings of Shakespeare’s plays. We are ready now to turn to Charles Lamb’s “King Lear.” * * * As discussed briefly in the preceding chapter, in his essay “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation,” Charles Lamb offered a sustained critique of performed Shakespeare plays, arguing that in pursuit of the successful stage realization we succeed only in witnessing (or producing) a diminished version of the play available to us more successfully as readers. But rather than let his

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own readers think him “ungrateful,” Lamb acknowledges how powerful a theatrical performance can be. This comes, however, in the form of a recollection (one of Lamb’s favorite rhetorical strategies) of “the very high degree of satisfaction” he had had “some years back from seeing for the first time a tragedy of Shakespeare performed.” He continues, It seemed to embody and realize conceptions which had hitherto assumed no distinct shape. But dearly do we pay all our life after for this juvenile pleasure, this sense of distinctness. When the novelty is past, we find to our cost that instead of realizing an idea, we have only materialized and brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood. We have let go a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance.10

It is useful to note that Lamb’s acknowledgment of pleasure in theatrical performance comes as a memory of a past experience, one that he is quick to identify here as juvenile, when considered from the vantage point he now occupies. And as such, this juvenile pleasure of the theater is rather a close kin to the “childish pleasure of getting his gilt robes and spectre [sic] again” Lamb imagines for the Lear of Tate’s happy ending—“as if at his years and with his experience, any thing was left but to die” (“Tragedies,” 33). This rejection of theatrical pleasure reads like a narrative of maturation: as a child, the theater may well “embody and realize conceptions which had hitherto assumed no distinct shape.” But as an adult, such pleasure is “merely” childish and worse: it serves to distract us from the goal of the true encounter with Shakespeare. Lamb wants his readers to know that none of this should be construed as a criticism of Shakespeare; to the contrary, Lamb asserts that Shakespeare’s plays are “less calculated for performance on a stage” than those of virtually any other dramatist because of their greatness: “Their distinguishing excellence is a reason they should be so” (“Tragedies,” 20). The fundamental problem for Lamb is that theatrical presentation obscures the key point: the greatness of Shakespeare’s plays is not a matter of embodiment of any kind, but is rather wholly immaterial and therefore not susceptible to representation. Taking Lear as his specimen, Lamb makes the case explicit: “The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual.” The contrast, then, between the personated Lear on the stage and the Lear in the reader’s mind is absolute precisely because the “storms” against which Lear battles are “storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his mind, with all its vast riches.” Lamb continues,

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It is his mind which is laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on; even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of age: while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear,—we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodized from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind bloweth where it listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind. (“Tragedies,” 32)

Set against this intellectual core of Lear, Lamb wants to know: “What gesture shall we appropriate to this? What has the voice or eye to do with such things?” (“Tragedies,” 32). In the face of such an assault upon any and all attempts to embody the mighty Lear, Lamb can only set aside dismissively the vast repertoire of the techniques of the stage as not only irrelevant to the intellectual substance of the play, but as active distractions that serve only to diminish the play altogether. “Do we see in our mind’s eye what Webb or any other robe-maker could pattern?” The increasingly prevalent desire for something like theatrical verisimilitude is part of the problem—“the inevitable consequence of imitating every thing to make all things natural. Whereas the reading of a tragedy is a fine abstraction” (“Tragedies,” 38). For Lamb, reading is superior to performance in the same way that mature pleasures are superior to juvenile ones: reading “presents to the fancy just so much of external appearances as to make us feel that we are among flesh and blood, while by far the greater and better part of our imagination is employed upon the thoughts and internal machinery of the character” (“Tragedies,” 38). Lamb’s critical commentary on Shakespeare (together with his commentary on such adapters such as Nahum Tate and Thomas Shadwell who in his view fail in their undertakings with the Shakespearean originals) provide something of the theoretical explanation of the creative work Lamb undertook in his retellings of Shakespeare’s tragedies. The anti-theatrical basis of Lamb’s understanding of Shakespeare’s plays—and his tragedies in particular—helps to explain the generic choice in favor of the prose narrative, a decision that he would have made together with Mary Lamb, but a choice that was by no means a natural or an obvious one. It is worth stressing here that the Lambs wrote the very first prose narrative retellings of Shakespeare’s plays in English (twenty of them, at any rate). While this suggests that there was no ready model for their undertaking, it at the same time

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highlights the basic fact that they had to make the choice of form or genre deliberately. Indeed, in terms of adaptations of play, the preferred form was the dramatic form, the play, hence Tate adapting Lear (and Coriolanus ) as plays, and the many other Restoration, and later eighteenth-century poets and dramatists who undertook theatrical adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays—Thomas Shadwell, John Dryden, Lewis Theobald, and many others besides. To the extent that Tales from Shakespeare breaks with the dominant tradition of theatrical adaptations, they should be understood to have been radical, even revolutionary, in conception and execution. At the same time, Lamb’s decision to adapt Shakespeare’s King Lear and not Tate’s History of King Lear is also a radical step, considering the enduring presence on the London stages of Tate’s adaptation.11 This decision also serves to highlight the degree to which for Lamb what constituted the real or true Shakespeare was to be found not before the footlights, but rather between the boards of a printed book. On this level, then, Lamb’s retelling as prose narrative (and not as a play) offers an implicit acknowledgment of his critical understanding of the nature of Shakespeare’s achievement and the vector by which that achievement can best be encountered: print. Lamb begins his retelling of Lear with a summary of identities and relationships: a statement, in a single sentence, of facts, as it were, that at the same time serves to center the narrative to follow squarely on character (as opposed, say, to setting or plot): Lear, king of Britain, had three daughters; Goneril, wife to the duke of Albany; Regan, wife to the duke of Cornwall; and Cordelia, a young maid, for whose love the king of France and the duke of Burgundy were joint suitors, and were at this time making stay for that purpose in the court of Lear.12

But the case is a bit more complicated than it may appear initially. If we look to Shakespeare’s play and the way in which it opens, we see a number of differences introduced in Lamb’s version. First, and most obviously, Lamb does not begin his retelling where—and, more to the point, when—Shakespeare begins his. Shakespeare’s play begins with a brief exchange between Kent and Gloucester and their fleetingly brief speculation about which of the two dukes, Albany or Cornwall (and not, significantly, which of Lear’s daughters) the king “affected” most. This inconclusive exchange that obliquely alerts us to a tension or perhaps a nascent rivalry between the two dukes is replaced immediately by Gloucester’s introduction (to Kent and to us) of his natural son Edmund. It is only

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after this curious presentation of the Albany–Cornwall relationship and the figure of Edmund whose very existence, we might say, stages (even at this early moment in the play) questions of authenticity and legitimacy, that we take up the matter of Lear’s map, his plan to divide his kingdom, and the love test among his three daughters. So much for what we know within the first thirty lines of Shakespeare’s play. We might consider now what we do not know from this opening set of speeches. We do not know that Lear has daughters; we do not know that two of these daughters are married, one to the duke of Albany and the other to the duke of Cornwall; we do not know that the third, and the youngest, is being wooed by the French king and the duke of Burgundy; and we do not know that these French suitors are present in Lear’s court. We do not even know, as a matter of fact, that the king is Lear (or Lear the king), or that his kingdom is Britain. In other words, Lamb’s opening paragraph provides us with knowledge that we literally cannot possess in the corresponding opening moment of Shakespeare’s play. This superabundance of knowledge in Lamb’s tale means a great deal for the retelling and for our relationship to it. And we would do well to investigate the source or sources of this greater knowledge. In terms of the characters identified in Lamb’s opening paragraph, the knowledge on display and in play suggests that the opening paragraph has assumed the function for the tale’s readers that would have been supplied by the printed play’s dramatis personae: that list of characters and roles we are accustomed to finding at the outset of every play, even before the play itself actually begins. But since it is the case that the dramatis personae, as in so many other features we have grown used to seeing and used to relying upon for information in printed versions of plays (act and scene divisions, for example, or standardized speech prefixes and stage directions) are, strictly speaking, nearly always non-Shakespearean, then the knowledge of them can only be editorial in nature. And as such, this knowledge derives ultimately from two facts: first, that the narrator exists outside the text, as it were, because he (if it is a male narrator) has knowledge here at the beginning that is not strictly present at the beginning of the story-in-narration; and second, that the narrator’s narrative is possible at all only because it is informed by a summary of actions that will unfold for readers but that has already unfolded for the narrator functioning, in effect, outside of the time of the story-in-narration. All of this serves to grant the narrator—and therefore the narrative he tells, which is the tale itself—an unassailable authority. And it is this that the

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tale as such can offer: authority. But importantly, it is an authority in lieu of authenticity. And by extension, Lamb as creator of the tale (who is also at the same time greater than the narrator of the tale) can be authoritative in his retelling in ways that even Shakespeare cannot be as his story unfolds across the duration of the play, either in performance or in reading. And correspondingly, Lamb’s authoritativeness can never approach the status of authenticity, if that authenticity—like Walter Benjamin’s notion of the aura—always only exclusively attends the original work of art.13 This probably holds true for all the Tales: while what they are telling is not Shakespeare, it is also the case that what they are retelling is not Shakespeare either—neither the language, certainly (not even when quoting, because quotation is itself a way of denying the immediacy of language in action: it re-presents a set-piece of language), nor the story that the plays themselves tell. The tales are inevitably disordered by the nature of the very mechanisms of retelling. (Borrowing terminology from the Russian Formalists, we can say that a given remediation of Shakespeare is a narrative that tells a certain “story” [fabula] and that the discursive arrangement by which the story is told is its “plot” [sjužet ]. Thus it becomes clear that any one story could be retold with any number of variations in the arrangement of its particular events; each one retelling would then constitute a different plot, but all of them would nevertheless narrate the same story. The terms fabula and sjužet can be helpful in describing the largely obscured and complicated work that a remediation represents—particularly when we consider the intentional nature of the claims concerning the relation to source, and to the source as destination. The theory that underlies the freedom or license with sjužet depends upon an understanding of the fabula itself as communicable outside sjužet —or rather, independently of a particular sjužet. Indeed, not only the success of any particular retelling, but precisely the viability of remediation altogether depends upon just this theory.)14 The superabundance of knowledge that runs through, and perhaps even helps to define, Lamb’s retelling has its opposite and contrary movement: the setting aside of certain features of Shakespeare’s play, an act that can be understood as the rejection or (to borrow a term from Stanley Cavell in an apposite context of his reading of Shakespeare’s King Lear), the disowning of certain forms or types or instances of knowledge.15 As discussed in the preceding chapter, I would like to identify these disavowals as acts of deletion, one of the principal strategies available to the remediator of plays. There are two centrally important deletions in Lamb’s “King Lear.”

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The first is the most obvious plot deletion: Lamb’s decision to excise the Gloucester plot altogether, so that in Lamb’s retelling we do not find that portion of Shakespeare’s play that he imported—in remediated form, of course—from Sidney’s Arcadia. Lamb seems to have cut the Gloucester subplot for a number of reasons. First, there is the constraint of the roughly five-thousand word limit for the retellings published in Tales; the elimination of the Gloucester story represented the opportunity for a clean and self-contained excision that would leave untouched the whole rest of the play. Then there is the fact that there is a great deal of material in the Gloucester subplot that Lamb may have found unsuitable for young readers: the fraternal treachery of Edmund; the savage blinding of Gloucester on stage; and, perhaps most significantly, the bleak nihilism to which these events lead the old earl. The second major deletion is the most obvious of all but is also the one that ironically tends to escape notice: Lamb’s deletion of Shakespeare’s poetry. As we saw in the preceding chapter, in their Preface to the Tales from Shakespeare, the Lambs speak directly to the question of Shakespeare’s language; it is, in fact, the first matter addressed in the Preface: The following Tales are meant to be submitted to the young reader as an introduction to the study of Shakespeare, for which purpose his words are used whenever it seemed possible to bring them in; and in whatever has been added to give them the regular form of a connected story, diligent care has been taken to select such words as might least interrupt the effect of the beautiful English tongue in which he wrote: therefore, words introduced into our language since his time have been as far as possible avoided. (Tales, v)

The monumental difficulty—some would say impossibility—of adapting Shakespeare’s “beautiful English tongue” was made more challenging still, the Lambs write, by seeking to remediate the plays into prose narrative form. It is within the context of discussing this matter that the Preface (as we saw in the previous chapter) casts the retellings as mere “little foretastes of the great pleasure” awaiting the Lambs’ young readers “in their elder years.” And, once again, the Lambs’ admit their remediated tales to be “small and valueless coins … pretending to no other merit than as faint and imperfect stamps of Shakespeare’s matchless image.” Setting aside for the moment consideration of the complicated ways in which this passage works to connect the Lambs’ retellings to Shakespeare’s image—as opposed to his plays—we can see that the Lambs insist that at least one measure by

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which their retellings are “imperfect stamps” is the inability (their inability, perhaps) to reproduce Shakespeare’s language—an issue that seems to have given remediators such as Nahum Tate far less cause for worry, or selfdeprecation. The Lambs’ articulate this failure of language and style in striking fashion: Faint and imperfect images they must be called, because the beauty of his language is too frequently destroyed by the necessity of changing many of his excellent words into words far less expressive of his true sense, to make it read something like prose; and even in some few places, where his blank verse is given unaltered, as hoping from its simple plainness to cheat the young readers into the belief that they are reading prose, yet still his language being transplanted from its own natural soil and wild poetic garden, it must want much of its native beauty. (Tales, 1–2)

Perhaps the best way to consider the remediator’s response to the (impossible) challenge represented by Shakespeare’s poetry is to consider a particular sustained example. In King Leir, Shakespeare’s primary source, the faithful counselor, named Perillus (rather than Kent), is silent throughout the love-test scene, offering only a single comment that comes at the end of the scene: Oh, how I grieve to see my lord thus fond To dote so much upon vain flattering words. Ah, if he but with good advice had weigh’d The hidden tenor of her humble speech, Reason to rage should not have given place, Nor poor Cordella suffer such disgrace. (King Leir, 1.3.135–40)

It is important to note that these lines are not spoken to the king, nor to Cordella, either. They are offered only to the audience. As a consequence, Perillus’s speech (again, the only one he offers in the entire love-test scene), while it does serve the purpose of letting the audience know that Perillus at least has better judgment in this matter than does Leir, nevertheless does not serve any dramatic purpose and attains the status, as it were, of a summary accompanied by rather overt indicators of how exactly the audience members should understand what they have just witnessed: Leir’s inability to distinguish between the flattery offered by Gonoril and Ragan and Cordella’s honest, if humble, profession of duty and love.

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One reading of the corresponding, though vastly altered, scene in King Lear reveals both Shakespeare’s greater skill in depicting the great emotion that suffuses this crucial moment and his “beautiful English tongue,” as well. And these come together in a powerfully dramatic exchange, something wholly missing from Shakespeare’s source text. When Kent seeks to intervene in Lear’s growing wrath at Cordelia’s reply to the love test, and to his hasty granting of her portion to Cornwall and Albany, Lear warns: “The bow is bent and drawn, make from the shaft,” but Kent presses on: Let it fall rather, though the fork invade The region of my heart. Be Kent unmannerly When Lear is mad! What wouldst thou do, old man? Think’st thou that duty shall have dread to speak When power to flattery bows? To plainness honor’s bound When majesty falls to folly. Reserve thy state, And in thy best consideration check This hideous rashness. Answer my life, my judgment: Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least, Nor are those empty-hearted whose low sounds Reverb no hollowness. (Lear, 1.1.141–52)

In Lear, Kent speaks directly—and confrontationally, even—with the king. In doing this he demonstrates the unshakable loyalty that will characterize his actions and his language throughout the entire play, even at the cost of his own banishment. At the same time, and in sharp distinction to the version Shakespeare found in King Leir, Kent’s speech is not functionally abstracted from the action of the scene, but rather substantially helps to generate that action. Thus much Shakespeare as remediator of source material; what happens to Shakespeare’s text when subsequently altered by later writers? In Tate’s 1681 adaptation, Kent’s speeches throughout the scene are drastically reduced—not only in length, but in scope and power as well. Upon hearing the king’s pronouncements against Cordelia and his granting of her portion to Cornwall and Albany, and the king’s threat—“Away, the bow is bent, make from the shaft,” Kent’s response is eviscerated of its power, much of which derives from Kent’s righteous indignation (which is given full expression in Lear) and from his evocative and stirring figurative language, thus:

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No, let it fall and drench within my heart, Be Kent unmannerly when Lear is mad: Thy youngest daughter—. (History, 1.1.151–54)

While Tate retains a portion of Kent’s fierceness and courage—he will tell the king “I’ll thunder in thine ear my just complaint,/ And tell thee to thy face that thou doest ill” (1.1.160–61)—he nevertheless strips the earl of most of the language that in Shakespeare grants him such power and authority in defense of Cordelia against Lear’s outrages. In Tate, we have moved—some might say fallen—far from Shakespeare’s “beautiful English tongue.” In Lamb’s retelling, however, we see a fundamentally different ethos—and perhaps more to the point, a different aesthetic—at play. In Lamb’s “King Lear,” Kent is described as having “the courage to interpose between the incensed king and his wrath.” And when “the passionate Lear on pain of death commanded him to desist,” the narrator continues, “the good Kent was not so to be repelled.” The narrative continues and depicts Kent’s conviction and loyalty in what we might say is a remarkably Shakespearean idiom: He had been a most faithful counselor in times past to the king, and he besought him now that he would see with his eyes (as he had done in many weighty matters) and go by his advice still, and in his best consideration recall this hideous rashness; for he would answer with his life his judgment that Lear’s youngest daughter did not love him least, nor were those emptyhearted whose low sound gave no token of hollowness. When power bowed to flattery, honor was bound to plainness. For Lear’s threats, what could he do to him whose life was already at his service? That should not hinder duty from speaking. (“King Lear,” 82)

Lamb’s own poetic or aesthetic sensibilities are on display in very many moments in his “King Lear.” When addressing the matter of Kent’s actions in response to his banishment, Lamb offers the following paragraph: True love and fidelity are no more to be estranged by ill, than falsehood and hollow-heartedness can be conciliated by good, usage. This eminently appears in the instance of the good Earl of Kent, who, though banished by Lear, and his life made forfeit if he were found in Britain, chose to stay and abide all consequences as long as there was a chance of his being useful to the king his master. See to what mean shifts and disguises poor loyalty is forced to submit sometimes; yet it counts nothing base or unworthy so as it can but

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do service where it owes an obligation! In the disguise of a serving-man, all his greatness and pomp laid aside, this good earl proffered his services to the king, who, not knowing him to be Kent in that disguise, but pleased with a certain plainness, or rather bluntness, in his answers, which the earl put on (so different from that smooth, oily flattery which he had so much reason to be sick of, having found the effects not answerable in his daughter), a bargain was quickly struck, and Lear took Kent into his service by the name of Caius, as he called himself, never suspecting him to be his once great favorite, the high and mighty Earl of Kent. (“King Lear,” 84)

In addition to Lamb’s serious investment, which we can call literary in nature, in writing so movingly and fondly of “the good Kent,” we can detect here and elsewhere in the retelling instances of dilation—that other great strategy available to remediation. In this case, it is Lamb’s very substantial interest in dilating upon the figure of Kent. For Jonathan Bate, in his essay “Lamb on Shakespeare,” this dilation becomes an “undue emphasis” on the earl. As evidence, Bate points to the role that Lamb gives Kent in securing the king’s removal to Dover—an act that in Shakespeare’s play is given instead to Gloucester: And from this and many such wild speeches which he uttered the good Caius plainly perceived that he was not in his perfect mind, but that his daughters’ ill-usage had really made him go mad. And now the loyalty of this worthy Earl of Kent showed itself in more essential services than he had hitherto found opportunity to perform. For with the assistance of some of the king’s attendants who remained loyal he had the person of his royal master removed at daybreak to the castle of Dover, where his own friends and influence, as Earl of Kent, chiefly lay; and himself, embarking for France, hastened to the court of Cordelia, and did there in such moving terms represent the pitiful condition of her royal father, and set out in such lively colors the inhumanity of her sisters, that this good and loving child with many tears besought the king, her husband, that he would give her leave to embark for England, with a sufficient power to subdue these cruel daughters and their husbands and restore the old king, her father, to his throne; which being granted, she set forth, and with a royal army landed at Dover. (“King Lear,” 89)

As Bate points out, Lamb’s Kent plays a significantly enhanced role in his adaptation when compared to Shakespeare’s play in which, again, it is Gloucester rather than Kent who removes Lear to Dover—and in which, among other differences, only letters are sent to Cordelia in France.16 This dilation of Kent’s role in Lamb’s “King Lear” is significant and is even

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more so when we consider (as Bate and others remind us) the ways in which Shakespeare, as reviser or adapter of his own earlier work, actually reduces the role of Kent (especially in act four) in his revision of Q for the F version.17 For Bate, this dilation of the earl of Kent is first an expression of Lamb’s distinguishing concern with sympathy in Shakespeare’s play—an extension, as it were, of Lamb’s own “capacity to go outside himself, to see from the point of view of others.” Pointing to the scene of the storm on the heath, Bate argues that sympathy emerges as the key critical—and, I would add, creative—faculty at play in Lamb’s adaptation. “The sympathy, the bond of love,” Bate writes, “that develops between the group of destitute characters on the heath is so strong that the play in not ‘pure tragedy’—there are positive values amidst the bleakness” (Bate, 83–84). And secondly, offering a biographically informed suggestion that is based in part upon Lamb’s relationship with the great Romantic poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, Bate writes that perhaps Lamb enhances the role of Kent because “he saw himself as a Kent-figure, characterized by loyalty and honesty, a willingness to remain in the shadow of the great souls around him, a preference for plain language, prose to the verse of Wordsworth and Coleridge.”18 It may or may not be the case that Lamb saw himself as a Kent-like figure in his relationships with Wordsworth or Coleridge—and in any case we are not likely to know. What is more certain, however, and we know this because it comes to us from Lamb himself, is his assertion—striking for its vehemence—that Kent was “the noblest pattern of virtue which even Shakespeare conceived.”19 When Lamb considers the conclusion of King Lear, particularly the so-called recognition scene in which Caius is revealed to be the disguised earl, along with Kent’s humanitarian gesture to secure Lear’s peace in death—“Vex not his ghost. Oh, let him pass. He hates him/ That would upon the rack of this tough world/ Stretch him out longer” (5.3.315–17)—he elaborates at somewhat greater length upon his assertion, cast (as it is) in the form of an observation, of Kent’s greatness. Kent is, Lamb writes, “the noblest feature of the conceptions of [Shakespeare’s] divine mind.” But for Lamb, Kent’s sublimity, as it were, leads on to a sustained observation about the even more sublime work of Shakespeare, whose greatness as an artist in this instance is a function of the lightness of his touch: So ends “King Lear,” the most stupendous of the Shakespearian dramas; and Kent, the noblest feature of the conceptions of his divine mind. This is

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the magnanimity of authorship, when a writer, having a topic presented to him, fruitful of beauties for common minds, waives his privilege, and trusts to the judicious few for understanding the reason of his abstinence. What a pudder would a common dramatist have raised here of a reconciliation scene, a perfect recognition, between the assumed Caius and his master! —to the suffusing of many fair eyes, and the moistening of cambric handkerchiefs. The old dying king partially catching at the truth, and immediately lapsing into obliviousness, with the high-minded carelessness of the other to have his services appreciated, as one that “served not for gain,/ Or follow’d out of form” are among the most judicious, not to say heart-touching, strokes in Shakespeare.20

Kent’s role—indeed, his central position—in Lamb’s retelling of King Lear is one of its most important features and not only reflects a certain sympathetic response by Lamb to Kent in Shakespeare’s play as a figuration of sympathy itself (to say nothing of loyalty and duty, other defining laudable characteristics of this character), but also is a function of another key deletion Shakespeare enacts upon his primary source, King Leir: the elimination of that play’s overt—and overtly Judeo-Christian—religiosity. In King Leir, we never doubt that the world of the play is a Judeo-Christian one. Of the many examples, these few should suffice to indicate just how thoroughly Judeo-Christian the play’s setting and the play’s ethos are. When Cordella opens act four with a soliloquy, it begins in proper devotional form: I have been over-negligent today In going to the temple of my God To render thanks for all His benefits Which He miraculously hath bestow’d on me In raising me out of my mean estate Whenas I was devoid of worldly friends And placing me in such a sweet content As far exceeds the reach of my deserts. (King Leir, 4.1.1–8)

4.7 stages the moment of the attempted assassination of Perillus and Leir when they are defenseless and wholly vulnerable to Ragan’s plot. When the assassin (called simply “Messenger”) reveals Gonoril’s letter in which her contempt for Leir and her complicity in the plot is revealed, Perillus cries out: “O just Jehovah, whose almighty power/ Doth govern all things in this spacious world,/ How canst Thou suffer such outrageous acts/ To be committed without just revenge?” (4.7.206–9). But their redemption

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comes immediately and as the result of “Thunder and lightning,” which upon its second occurrence so frightens the would-be murderer that he abandons his attempt and flees: “It thunders. [Messenger] quakes, and lets fall the dagger …”—a series of interventions that Perillus correctly reads as providential: “Oh, happy sight! He means to say my lord!/ The King of Heaven continue this good mind” (King Leir, 4.7. 293 SD and 296–97).21 And perhaps most movingly, the Judeo-Christian ethos of the play is manifest in Leir’s benediction offered upon his reunion with Cordella: The blessing which the God of Abraham gave Unto the tribe of Judah light on thee And multiply thy days, that thou mayst see Thy children’s children prosper after thee. Thy faults which are just—none that I do know— God pardon on high and I forgive below. (King Leir, 5.4.232–37)22

The complete elimination of Judeo-Christian references—and of any religious dimension apart, perhaps from religious cynicism (Gloucester’s assertion that the gods kill us for sport, for instance) and the vague reference in the closing paragraph to “the judgment of Heaven” that leads to the deaths of Edmund, Goneril, and Regan—constitutes one of Shakespeare’s key deletions as he adapts the Lear story for his play, at least as presented in King Leir. And for many readers, the elimination of any religious sentiment from the play (which is different than the pagan setting of the play) helps to account for the bleakness of Shakespeare’s version of the Lear story. I want to suggest that one of Lamb’s responses to this absence, within the self-imposed parameters of fidelity to which Lamb quite rigorously holds himself, is the dilation we see on Kent’s role in “King Lear.” For Lamb, Kent becomes the site, as it were, for explicit and overt moral righteousness that in many ways is otherwise missing from Shakespeare’s remediation of King Leir. In this regard, Lamb’s retelling seeks an acceptable substitution for the morality offered in Leir as overt religious sentiment, and that is excised from Shakespeare’s version. The dilation of the Kent role, in this regard, returns us in some ways to the spirit (if not the aesthetic) of King Leir. It is also the case that Lamb’s retelling (as mentioned previously) includes, albeit in abbreviated form, the figure of the Fool, who in Shakespeare’s play carries some significant portion of the moral burden borne in Lamb’s adaptation much more heavily by Kent. But if we consider the

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versions of King Lear that were available to Lamb on the London stages (as well as in a good many printed texts), that he restores the role of the Fool that had been completely deleted by Tate and his adapters for a century and a half, is something of a radical gesture. And in his “King Lear,” the Fool indeed appears and does provide some of the critical commentary that his greater original does in King Lear: Nor was Kent the only friend Lear had. In his degree, and as far as so insignificant a personage could shew his love, the poor fool … clung to Lear after he had given away his crown, and by his witty sayings would keep up his good humour; though he could not refrain from sometimes jeering at his master for his imprudence, in uncrowning himself, and giving all away to his daughters: at which time, as he rhymingly expressed it, these daughters

For sudden joy did weep, And he for sorrow sung, That such a king should play bo-peep, And go the fools among. (“King Lear,” 84)23

To this extent, at least, Lamb’s Fool provides another voice, as limited as it is, that seeks to provide a moral orientation—for the king, to be sure, but for the readers of Lamb’s tale as well. Instances of Kent’s moral sensibility are evident in many moments in Lamb’s “King Lear” (even as they are echoed by the Fool’s comments) and perhaps reach their culmination in the final scene of the tale in which Kent (as suggested above) declines to press the old king’s mind too hard or too far, when the only point in doing so would be to have credit accrue to Kent and his constancy and loyalty, and—his final act of fealty—Kent follows his king into the grave. Lamb writes, Before he died, the good Earl of Kent, who had still attended his old master’s steps from the first of his daughters’ ill-usage to this sad period of his decay, tried to make him understand that it was he who had followed him under the name of Caius; but Lear’s care-crazed brain at that time could not comprehend how that could be, or how Kent and Caius could be the same person, so Kent thought it needless to trouble him with explanations at such a time; and, Lear soon after expiring, this faithful servant to the king, between age and grief for his old master’s vexations, soon followed him to the grave. (“King Lear,” 91)

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The deaths of Lear and Kent retold here follow quickly upon the crucial moment in Lamb’s retelling that among other things marks his great alteration in King Lear that was both on the stage and in the popular imagination since Tate’s monumental decision to restore the story’s happy ending: the re-telling of the death of Cordelia. Lamb rises admirably, I would argue, to this particular challenge—in part simply because he includes it in his tale, and in part because he refuses to present Cordelia’s death within a mollifying context, even as he insists upon imparting to his young readers a very difficult (moral) lesson on the injustice and cruelty of the real world. Lamb tells of the deaths of Goneril and Regan, then shifts the focus of our gaze.24 And with this shift—from Goneril and Regan, but also from justice to injustice—we are forced to confront the horrors that Tate, and literally generations of players on the stage, refused to perform: While the eyes of all men were upon this event, admiring the justice displayed in their deserved deaths, the same eyes were suddenly taken off from this sight to admire at the mysterious ways of the same power in the melancholy fate of the young and virtuous daughter, the Lady Cordelia, whose good deeds did seem to deserve a more fortunate conclusion. But it is an awful truth that innocence and piety are not always successful in this world. The forces which Goneril and Regan had sent out under the command of the bad Earl of Gloucester were victorious, and Cordelia, by the practices of this wicked earl, who did not like that any should stand between him and the throne, ended her life in prison. Thus heaven took this innocent lady to itself in her young years, after showing her to the world an illustrious example of filial duty. Lear did not long survive this kind child. (“King Lear,” 90–91)

What stands out as most striking here is Lamb’s willingness to present the murder of Cordelia without seeking to minimize its horror. Lamb addresses directly the discomfort Cordelia’s death causes for his readers—even as Tate and others responded to this discomfort by deleting it altogether—with the sad and “awful truth” about a world in which “innocence and piety are not always successful.” So moving is this representation of Shakespeare’s truths in King Lear, that it is both easy and natural enough that we should not detect what is less obvious in this moment: the presence of the narrator as the source of moral commentary even greater than is the figure of the earl of Kent. And it is by way of the moral commentary thus provided that the narrator emerges as the central figure of the tale. The narrator’s moral commentary comes in a number of forms. We see it in a phrase used frequently to describe a specific character; thus we have

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“the good Kent” (or “the good Caius”) identified for us at virtually every mention of the character. Or we encounter the “pleasant, honest fool” (“King Lear,” 85), or “the hated Goneril” (“King Lear,” 86), or “these wicked daughters” (“King Lear,” 90). At other times, the commentary is more substantial, as when we hear of Goneril’s profession of her love for Lear as “a deal of such professing stuff, which is easy to counterfeit where there is no real love” (“King Lear,” 80); or when Regan is described as “made of the same hollow metal as her sister” (“King Lear,” 80); or when Cordelia becomes, we are told, “disgusted with the flattery of her sisters, whose hearts she knew were far from their lips, and seeing that all their coaxing speeches were only intended to wheedle the old king out of his dominions, that they and their husbands might reign in his lifetime, made no other reply but this—that she loved his majesty according to her duty, neither more nor less” (“King Lear,” 81). At other times, however, the narrator’s moral commentary is elaborated quite beyond the role of narrator, and even at times provides his commentary in excess of what Lamb would have found in Shakespeare’s play. This is the case when the narrator seems to rather go to great lengths to tell of Lear’s response to Cordelia’s profession of love and at the same time to excuse it on her behalf: Cordelia, who in earnest loved her old father even almost extravagantly as her sisters pretended to do, would have plainly told him so at any other time, in more daughter-like and loving terms, and without these qualifications, which did indeed sound a little ungracious; but after the crafty, flattering speeches of her sisters, which she had seen draw such extravagant rewards, she thought the handsomest thing she could do was to love and be silent. This put her affection out of suspicion of mercenary ends, and showed that she loved, but not for gain; and that her professions, the less ostentatious they were, had so much the more of truth and sincerity than her sisters’. (“King Lear,” 81)

And later in the tale the narrator describes how his eldest daughters, with particular cruelty, sought to strip away all of the Lear’s retainers so that “by little and little would [they] have abated him of all his train, all respect (little enough for him that once commanded a kingdom), which was left him to show that he had once been a king!” (“King Lear,” 87). But no sooner is this said that the narrator appears to grow concerned that these details reveal a vain Lear interested in the outward trappings of power, even after having given away his status and his power altogether.

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The remedy is not far to seek: further commentary that, as is the case for all the many instances of moral commentary in the tale that are intended to guide the young reader through from start to finish, provides correctives and authoritative insights that steer Lear clear of vanity, and the readers toward the tale’s moral meaning and significance: Not that a splendid train is essential to happiness, but from a king to a beggar is a hard change, from commanding millions to be without one attendant; and it was the ingratitude in his daughters’ denying more than what he would suffer by the want of it, which pierced this poor king to the heart; in so much that, with this double ill-usage, and vexation for having so foolishly given away a kingdom, his wits began to be unsettled, and while he said he knew not what, he vowed revenge against those unnatural hags and to make examples of them that should be a terror to the earth! (“King Lear,” 87)

The final act of dilation, again in the form of the addition of moral commentary, comes in the closing paragraph of Lamb’s retelling and constitutes an important instance of deferral, which we have seen as itself a key strategy available to remediation. We saw it in the Preface to the Tales from Shakespeare (and will see it again in Chapter 6 in Mary Cowden Clarke’s remediations of Shakespeare for young readers) and there it took the form of casting the tales as “foretastes” (Tales, 1) to the great feast that awaits the young readers once they have grown and matured and can—at last—turn to Shakespeare’s originals. In the closing paragraph of “King Lear,” Lamb casts the narrator’s moral commentary with a slight twist: rather than limit the commentary to specific moments in the tale, as the narrator draws the tale to its close, the commentary becomes focused on what constitutes appropriate reading material for young readers of this retelling of King Lear. And as such, this act of commentary succeeds in the larger task of deferral: the setting up by setting apart some aspects of Shakespeare’s King Lear that are best left outside the parameters of the tale: How the judgment of Heaven overtook the bad Earl of Gloucester, whose treasons were discovered, and himself slain in single combat with his brother, the lawful earl, and how Goneril’s husband, the Duke of Albany, who was innocent of the death of Cordelia, and had never encouraged his lady in her wicked proceedings against her father, ascended the throne of Britain after the death of Lear, it is needless here to narrate, Lear and his three daughters being dead, whose adventures alone concern our story. (“King Lear,” 91)

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On perhaps the most basic level, this gesture of deferral, which is repeated many times in Tales from Shakespeare in a number of different forms (as well as in many subsequent versions) works to secure any particular remediation from critical objections that might be made over the deletion of certain material, for whatever reason—moral appropriateness, simplicity, focus, and so forth. At the same time, such deferrals also work to reify the authority of the remediation itself: citing what amounts to the limits imposed on the adaptation effectively cordons off the deleted or omitted material as subordinated, in radical fashion, to the perceived and often stated goals of the remediation. Doing so also has, I would argue, the perhaps surprising effect of laying a certain claim to the absent material, for what has been excluded is every bit a function of the remediation as what has been included. In this way, the retelling—in the local case, Lamb’s “King Lear”—can be said to include all those elements of Shakespeare’s King Lear that the deferral announced in the final paragraph cares to name under the sign of authorial erasure. The death of “the bad earl of Gloucester,” together with the ascension of the duke of Albany to the throne of Britain, are made present through this announcement of their literal absence from the tale. * * * Although the nature of their projects diverged in significant ways, the remedial and adaptive strategies employed by the Bowdlers and by the Lambs had in common at least the desire to produce versions of Shakespeare’s plays that, by certain subjective measures, might be “suitable” for young readers—or, in the former case especially, for the scene of family reading. As such, these projects necessarily addressed the Shakespearean text as inherited by tradition (as constructed, that is, largely through the efforts of a long line of editors), with the goal of producing approximations of that text through the practices of redaction and deletion, aided—in the case of the Lambs—with moments of dilation, moments when the adaptive texts offered such interpolated material as editorial commentary meant to supplement the Shakespeare storyline. For the Bowdlers, their Shakespeare text was offered in lieu of Shakespeare’s, a gesture underwritten by a clear and unambiguous moral agenda that sought the wholesale substitution of the inherited text by their own rigorously expurgated one, an ambition rationalized by the argument that such often drastic cutting of the inherited text actually managed to produce a more authentically Shakespearean

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“original” than the text corrupted and perverted through the centuries of its haphazard and at times debasing transmission. The Lambs, on the other hand, although they certainly wrote versions of Shakespeare’s plays that were intended as substitutions, their interest in substitution left the Shakespearean original intact (if out of the way) and was explicitly provisional in nature: the Lambs’ Tales, that is, were meant both to interest young readers in Shakespeare’s works through their remediation as narrative retellings and to propel these readers toward the Shakespearean originals in the fullness of time. This urge to offer altered versions of what was nevertheless identifiably Shakespeare was not, however, the only form of remediation undertaken in Shakespeare’s name and for the benefit of young readers through the nineteenth century—or into our own moment, for that matter. The following chapter considers the hugely popular work of Mary Cowden Clarke’s series of fifteen prequels (“tales,” as she called them) collected as The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (1850–1852), where we will see a wholly different strategy in play, a strategy that articulates an altogether different relationship to Shakespeare.25

Notes 1. In the interest of clarity, I will refer to Lamb’s retelling as “King Lear” (using quotation marks), so as to distinguish it from Shakespeare’s play King Lear. 2. Nahum Tate, The History of King Lear, ed. James Black (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), xv (hereafter cited as History, followed by page numbers). Black continues: It is almost idle to cite the printed scorn that the play has attracted, from Addison’s statement that in adaptation King Lear had ‘lost half its beauty,’ through Charles Lamb’s protest that Tate ‘had put his hook in the nostril of this Leviathan for … the showmen of the scene to draw the mighty beast about more easily,’ down to Hazelton Spencer’s contemptuous dismissal of it in this century as a ‘hodge-podge.’ Even Maynard Mack, evaluating the adaptation for the light it throws on the original, says that Tate’s Lear ‘invites ridicule and deserves it.’ (History, xv)

3. The anonymous Leir play can be found in these two editions Geoffrey Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 7 (London and New York: Routledge, Kegan Paul, and Columbia University Press, 1973), 337–402 and King Leir, ed. Tiffany Stern (London and New York: Nick Hern Books, Ltd. and Routledge, 2002).

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4. Black quotes an apposite passage (from Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Walter Raleigh [Oxford, 1908], 161–62): Cordelia, from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity. And if my sensations could add any thing to the general suffrage, I might relate, that I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor. (qtd. in History, xxxiv)

5. Black also offers language by Lewis Theobald on the matter, who argued that Cordelia and Lear “ought to have survived, as Mr. Tate has made them in his alteration. … Virtue ought to be rewarded, as well as vice punished, but in their deaths this moral is broke through” (The Censor, no. 10 [2 May 1715], qtd. in History, xxvii). 6. As James Black discusses in his edition of the play, Tate seems to have composed his version of Lear based wholly on his reading of Shakespeare’s play: “[T]here is no evidence,” Black writes, “that Tate used the Holinshed, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Milton, or any of the other histories available.” He continues: A parallel between the happy ending of Tate’s play and that of The Chronicle History of King Leir (published in 1605) is inconclusive in its implications, nor do certain verbal parallels in these two plays do more than intrigue the source-hunter. (History, 97)

7.

8.

9.

10.

Black also provides a useful list of passages of readings from the collation of History with Shakespeare’s play/s that demonstrates that Tate worked from copies of both the Q and the F texts of King Lear; see History, 98–99. William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R.A. Foakes, Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997), 1.2.1–22. See Stern’s edition of Leir (note #3, above), as well as Meredith Skura, “What Shakespeare Did with the Queen’s Men’s King Leir and When,” Shakespeare Survey 63 (2010): 311–25. The story of this adaptation has been well documented in the critical work of the “new revisionists” and does not require repetition in full here. Although the individual instances of changes Shakespeare made between the Q1 and the F text number in the hundreds, the most important ones for the present discussion can be quickly summarized: he enlarges the role of Lear, changes the characterization of figures such as Edgar and Albany, softens the horror of the mock trial scene by eliminating it altogether, and has Lear die under the illusion/delusion that Cordelia is yet alive. Charles Lamb, “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation,” in The Works of Charles

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and Mary Lamb, ed. E.V. Lucas, 3 vols. (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1903), 1: 97–111, 98. This crucial decision to adapt Shakespeare and not Tate is important, too, for thinking about the nature of the Lambs’ work in their adaptations as a whole. In her essay on the Tales, “Shakespeare for Girls: Mary Lamb and Tales from Shakespeare” (Children’s Literature 17 [1989]: 47–63), Jean I. Marsden argues that the overriding drive in the Tales was toward the depiction of love. Indeed, as Marsden writes, “love is the one element of the plot which is never abridged” (Marsden, 52). While this makes very good sense—and provides a compelling way to understand Mary Lamb’s transformation of Shakespeare’s comedies effectively into romances (and in which “love and the happy resolution of a marriage plot replaced humor” [Marsden, 52])—such is not the case with “King Lear.” Had the drive toward staging love been fundamental, Charles Lamb could easily have elected to adapt Tate’s History, with its Cordelia-Edgar love story. Charles Lamb, “King Lear,” in Tales from Shakespeare, in The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E.V. Lucas, 3 vols. (London: Methuen and Co., 1903), 3: 80–91, 80. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 217–51. Any given remediation of a Shakespeare play intends to retell the story of the play at hand. Othello, for example, reappears as “Othello,” the story—as Leon Garfield has it in his 1994 adaptation—of “a great general, a man in whom the state of Venice has put all its trust, a black man of immense dignity and splendour who is brought to madness, murder, and suicide by the skillful lies of the lieutenant he trusts and calls ‘honest Iago.’” Although a passage as apparently expository as this one necessarily represents a certain degree of interpretation (Garfield will hold only Iago responsible for Othello’s fall), this opening moment is recognizable as constituting in a most distilled and abridged form the fabula of Othello, and while there are necessarily great differences between Garfield’s adaptation and the Othello one reads in an edition of Shakespeare’s plays, there is a corresponding and perhaps more surprising set of differences on the level of sjužet, its plot. So, for example, Garfield’s version begins in an altogether unfamiliar fashion: The curtain rises on a chapel. Othello the Moor, commander of all forces of Venice, is to marry Desdemona. But it is a wedding that causes more rage than joy. Not only to Desdemona’s father, Brabantio, but to Iago, Othello’s ensign. IAGO (watching Desdemona and Othello) I do hate him as I hate hell’s pains. (They kiss.) O, you are well-tuned now! But I’ll set down the pegs that make this music, as honest as I am.

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Iago rushes through the dim and torchlit streets of Venice. He reaches Brabantio’s house and bangs on the door. IAGO Signior Brabantio, ho! Awake!

15. 16. 17.

18.

(Leon Garfield, Shakespeare, the Animated Tales: Othello [London: Heinemann, 1994], 13.) For a more detailed discussion, see Howard Marchitello, “Descending Shakespeare: Toward a Theory of Adaptation for Children,” in Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults, ed. Naomi Miller (Routledge, 2003), 180–89. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Jonathan Bate, “Lamb on Shakespeare,” Charles Lamb Bulletin, n.s. 51 (1985): 76–85, 83. Bate cites Michael Warren, “The Diminution of Kent,” in The Division of the Kingdom: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of ‘King Lear’, eds. Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 59–74. Bate continues: Lear and Hamlet were the two plays that exercised the most influence over the Romantic imagination. If we accept the identification of Lamb with Kent, the two plays may be yoked together. Coleridge said ‘I have a smack of Hamlet myself’ (Table Talk, 24 June 1827); Lamb plays Kent, the loyal servant, not to Lear but to Coleridge’s Hamlet. We are thus given a model for the relationship between the Shakespearean criticism of the two writers. … Kent is a furnisher of common sense remarks and single pithy insights; Hamlet philosophizes on them at length, occasionally wrong-headed or eccentric, always brilliant and enthusiastic. Put together, the two give us Shakespearean criticism at its best. (Bate, 84–85)

19. Charles Lamb, “On the Genius and Character of Hogarth,” in The Works of Charles Lamb, Vol. 3: Critical Essays, ed. William Macdonald (London: J.M. Dent & Co.; New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1903), 105–29, 107–8. 20. Charles Lamb, untitled fragment published in The Works of Charles Lamb, Vol. 3: Critical Essays, ed. William Macdonald (London: J.M. Dent & Co.; New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1903), 273–74. 21. The “thunder and lightning” here that appear heaven-sent are transformed in Shakespeare’s King Lear into the monstrous storm that Lear and the others are made to endure on the heath—one of Shakespeare’s great transformations from material he found in his source text. 22. These lines evidently inspired Shakespeare’s utter transformation of them into Lear’s violent curses hurled at Goneril and his call upon Nature: “Into her womb convey sterility,/ Dry up in her the organs of increase,/ And from her derogate body never spring/ A babe to honour her” (1.4.261–64).

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Interestingly, when Lamb comes to re-tell the curses, he adds a telling comment: “And he cursed his eldest daughter Goneril so as was terrible to hear. …” (Lamb, 135). 23. The immediately following paragraph continues this reportage: And in such wild sayings, and scraps of songs, of which he had plenty, this pleasant honest fool poured out his heart even in the presence of Gonerill herself, in many a bitter taunt and jest which cut to the quick; such as comparing the king to the hedge-sparrow, who feeds the young of the cuckoo till they grow old enough, and then has its head bit off for its pains; and saying, that an ass may know when the cart draws the horse (meaning that Lear’s daughters, that ought to go behind, now ranked before their father); and that Lear was no longer Lear, but the shadow of Lear; for which speeches he was once or twice threatened to be whipt. (“King Lear,” 85)

24. Lamb adds a detail not found in Shakespeare: That Albany, wise to his wife’s machinations and to her evil, had imprisoned Goneril and it was there that she took her own life. 25. Ann Thompson rightly identifies The Girlhood “one of the most famous and least read (though much maligned) prequels to Shakespeare.” Thompson continues: “Modern critics have condemned [Cowden Clarke’s] generally naturalistic approach as naïve, but contemporary reviewers were more appreciative, stressing the value of the stories for introducing young people, especially girls, to Shakespeare—as indeed was the author’s intention.” Ann Thompson, “Hamlet: Looking Before and After: Why So Many Prequels and Sequels?” in Reinventing the Renaissance: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries in Adaptation and Performance, eds. Sarah Annes Brown, Robert I. Lublin, and Lynsey McCulloch (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 17–31, 19.

CHAPTER 6

Design and the Fate of Character

Happy she who at eight or nine years old has a copy of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare given to her; opening a vista of even then understandable interest and enjoyment! Happy she who at twelve or thirteen has Shakespeare’s works themselves read to her by her mother, with loving selection of fittest plays and passages! Happy they who in mature years have the good taste and good sense to read aright the pages of Shakespeare, and gather thence wholesomest lessons and choicest delights! —Mary Cowden Clarke, “Shakespeare as the Girl’s Friend”1

In The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines , Mary Cowden Clarke—who already had established herself as a serious and important scholar of Shakespeare’s works with the 1845 publication of the first concordance to the plays and who would go on to publish two new editions of Shakespeare’s works in 1860 and 1865 (the latter in collaboration with her husband Charles)—sets out to depict the imagined pasts of Shakespeare’s heroines.2 These were stories that Cowden Clarke suggested would help her own readers—who were also readers of Shakespeare—to understand better the women these girls would grow to become “in the meridian blaze of perfection” on view in Shakespeare’s plays.3 That such an undertaking was a unique one was not lost on Cowden Clarke, who writes that “[i]f ever Preface were especially needful, it is surely so in the present instance” © The Author(s) 2019 H. Marchitello, Remediating Shakespeare in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22837-8_6

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(Girlhood, 1: iii).4 And indeed, the Preface immediately begins this task by offering “an explanatory word concerning the design” of her book: The design has been, to trace the probable antecedents in the history of some of Shakespeare’s women; to imagine the possible circumstances and influences of scene, event, and associate, surrounding the infant life of his heroines, which might have conduced to originate and foster those germs of character recognized in their maturity, as by him developed; to conjecture what might have been the first imperfect dawnings of that which he has shown us in the meridian blaze of perfection: and it was believed that such a design would combine much matter of interesting speculation, afford scope for pleasant fancy, and be productive of entertainment in the various narratives. (Girlhood, 1: iii)

As this paragraph suggests—and as the rest of the Preface will make wholly explicit—the central goals of Cowden Clarke’s work to provide “probable antecedents” of “Shakespeare’s women,” together with interest and entertainment for her presumably girl readership, are both predicated upon one fundamental assumption concerning the works of Shakespeare: that their essential investment and their enduring value lies in the presentation of character. It follows from this, moreover, that the fundamental value in reading Shakespeare’s plays lies in their utility in fashioning the character of his readers, a sentiment we saw in play for Charles and Mary Lamb and their remediations of the plays for young readers. Cowden Clarke goes to some lengths to justify this concern with character, even if such a focus brought with it a corresponding inattention to other matters one might suppose to fall within the purview of such narratives of antecedents, matters such as language, place, story, and time: Although little or no attempt will be found in these tales to give pictures of the times in which their chief actors may be supposed to have lived, yet it is hoped that no gross violation of probability in period, scene, or custom, has been committed. The development of character, not of history, has been the intention. (Girlhood, 1: iii)

Cowden Clarke offers an explicit justification for this concern with character: her narratives of the girlhoods of Shakespeare’s women must attend to character because character is precisely the destination in Shakespeare. Cowden Clarke is obliged “to place the heroines in such situations as should naturally lead up to, and account for, the known conclusion of their

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subsequent confirmed character and after-fate” (Girlhood, 1: iv). Cowden Clarke’s girls are depicted in their “‘sallet days,’ when they are ‘green in judgment,’—immature,—but the opening buds of the future ‘bright consummate flowers’ which [Shakespeare] has given to us in immortal bloom” (Girlhood, 1: iv). This concern with character was not unique, but rather can be said to be characteristic of a great deal of nineteenth-century discussions of Shakespeare. For it is the criticism of the great Shakespeareans of this century that came to discover an informing psychology motivating these characters that gradually yet inexorably came to convince the general (and even the professional) reader that these characters were somehow more than words on a page or dialogue upon the stage, that they were in some essential way, real people.5 And in this evolution of people from words that were transformed from signs constituting roles actors might play into the expressions and manifestations of people whom actors could impersonate in performance, works such as Cowden Clarke’s Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines doubtlessly played a part. Cowden Clarke’s defining interest in character, together with her interest in writing for girl readers, served to push her in the direction of the prequel as that form that would most readily allow her expansive dilation upon girlhoods and the development of character, both in her protagonists and in her young readers. At the same time, we can see Cowden Clarke engaging with Shakespeare and especially his characters in ways that simply would not obtain in expurgations or retellings in quite the same fashion. Indeed, by some measures, the nature of Cowden Clarke’s project—conjuring the girlhoods of Shakespeare’s adult heroines, many of whom survive their plays (Portia, Helena, Katharine and Bianca, Isabella, Rosalind and Celia, Innogen, Olivia, Viola, Beatrice and Hero, the “merry wives,” and Hermione), and some of whom do not (Juliet, Lady Macbeth, Ophelia, and Desdemona)—renders her work more challenging and complicated than either expurgating or retelling Shakespeare’s originals. This fact, it seems safe to say, follows in large part from the very form of the prequel itself, a form that Sarah Annes Brown argues is “essentially subversive in nature.”6 Because readers of prequels (assuming they know the prior text for which the prequel functions as a prehistory) will not be interested in simply a rehearsal of what they have already encountered in the “source” text, they instead will “want to be offered a new way into the old text” (Brown, 95).

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As a number of critics have argued recently, that way in for Cowden Clarke is through a subtle but nevertheless distinct interest in resisting certain features and tendencies she found—and evidently found disturbing—in Shakespeare’s plays.7 Citing approvingly Nina Auerbach’s argument that Cowden Clarke “frees the heroines from the boundaries of their plays, endowing them with rich lives of their own whose autonomy is impinged on by neither Shakespeare nor the man his play will make them love,” Brown at the same moment identifies the ways in which The Girlhood “does make us think about both Shakespeare and his heroes.”8 For Brown, it is precisely in the “gap between text and intertext” that “the full subversive force of [Cowden Clarke’s] championing of women and resentment of male-dominated society emerge.” In the “fierce debates” that Shakespeare’s have stimulated, “Cowden Clarke’s prequels are partisans rather than neutral witnesses” (Brown, 96). More recently, Sarah Barber has taken up this line of argument in convincing fashion, noting that—in contrast to the Bowdlers and the Lambs—Cowden Clarke declines to offer “an alternative Shakespeare,” but instead seeks to provide her young female readers “an intervention into Shakespeare.” Barber continues: “[Cowden Clarke’s] histories of the heroines maternally guide young women into acceptable readings of [Shakespeare’s] plays. The Girlhood is a kind of guarantee that young women will read the plays with what the Preface calls ‘appropriate interest.’”9 Cowden Clarke’s interest in shepherding her young readers toward “appropriate” reading of Shakespeare’s plays and, especially, of his heroines was (as Gail Marshall writes in her Introduction to a volume of Great Shakespeareans devoted to the works of Anna Jameson, Mary Cowden Clarke, Frances Anne Kemble, and Charlotte Cushman) the work of her professional life; Cowden Clarke “wrote throughout her life for an audience whose exposure to Shakespeare demanded careful mediation, but for whom, as for herself, that relationship might be crucial.”10 More particularly, at the heart of this enterprise—one shared in various ways by these nineteenth-century women writers—was the concern with the perception of the worth and value of women’s (literary) work: “Underlying the subsequent reception of these women’s work,” Marshall continues, “is the perception of how that work can now be seen as part of a nineteenth-century movement to achieve greater autonomy and professional recognition for women and their abilities” (Marshall, 9). In the chapter of this volume dedicated to Cowden Clarke, Gail Marshall, and Ann Thompson elaborate this point:

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Shakespeare is too potentially explosive—and useful—an author to be left unedited, unmediated, unexplained, as is evidenced in the versions of Shakespeare aimed explicitly at young girls which proliferated throughout the century, and which carry their pedagogic and ideological colours in full view.11

This focus on gender and Cowden Clarke’s interest in providing guidance to her young female readers as they begin to confront critical choices in the fashioning of their own lives has been instrumental in identifying the key formal matters at stake in these prequels. Because in Cowden Clarke’s hand the Shakespeare prequel is not only bounded in specific ways by its source text, but also engages in a certain contesting and, even, a resisting that prior text, a significant share of Cowden Clarke’s challenge in writing her prequels, and of our pleasure in reading them, is to navigate the resulting tensions between the constraints imposed by the original, on the one hand, and the autonomy in the prequel to contest or resist such constraints, on the other. To attend to either of these at the expense of its opposite risks nothing less than the failure of the project, either for Cowden Clarke as she writes her tales or for her audience who reads them. Cowden Clarke can neither render her prequel wholly subordinate to the Shakespeare original, nor completely sever the bonds to it that define the tale as prehistory. Likewise, readers of The Girlhood, in order to understand the double nature of the prequels as simultaneously bounded and autonomous, cannot reduce the tales to mere rehearsals of Shakespeare’s depiction of his heroines, nor identify its heroines as free agents in the act of exceeding the limits imposed by Shakespeare’s prior constraints. It is this defining tension between constraint and autonomy that characterizes The Girlhood as a remediation of Shakespeare. It is also the case—perhaps not surprisingly—that a corresponding tension between constraint and autonomy comes to characterize the particular narratives of the young heroines of Cowden Clarke’s tales. Citing Gail Marshall’s reading of The Girlhood as maintaining a fidelity to Shakespeare’s plays “to such an extent that they remove any possibility of agency from the women themselves,” Lauren Byler seeks to supplement this understanding of “the prequel form’s circumscription of female autonomy” by attending to the ways in which the prequels “do more than confirm the nature of female character as recognized by Shakespeare.”12 Byler continues: “Irrespective of her politics, Cowden Clarke chose to write in a prequel form that denaturalizes the authority of the original even as it affirms it” (Byler, 346).13 As does Barber, Byler too focuses attention on acts of reading depicted within the prequels themselves (the young Portia’s devotion to wide-ranging reading, including in the law, for instance),

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highlighting the role that reading plays through the complex mechanisms of identification in the fashioning of the character of Cowden Clarke’s readers.14 For Byler, Cowden Clarke “actually encourages her readers to read actively and suspiciously by building interpretive elasticity and competing analyses of Shakespeare into The Girlhood” (Byler, 361). It is this “highly self-conscious reading practice in which self-consciousness does not confirm sovereign self-determination” that capitalizes on the notion of autonomy by virtue of entailing “the persistent awareness of other voices, other ways of being, other stories” (Byler, 376). As the work of these critics demonstrates, it is certainly the case that, as Jennifer Higginbotham has written, Cowden Clarke’s Girlhood “participated in two widespread phenomena in late nineteenth-century culture: the rise of Shakespearean character criticism and the fetishization of female childhood. The Victorian propensity to treat Shakespeare’s characters as real people—to psychologise them and describe their actions as if they took place in history rather than in drama—resulted in a variety of essays on Shakespeare’s men and women in which the writers identify with them as examples of human experience.”15 To this list of informing phenomena that helped to engender Cowden Clarke’s project and the particular form that project took, as well as the character-constructing trajectory that her prequels articulate, I would like to propose a third phenomenon: the nineteenth-century investment in the much-contested notion of design, whether that means design as a concern in literary adaptation and remediation, or in what is called ArtsManufacture, or in natural history, or in the domain of the biological sciences.16 To be sure, the discussion of design as it impacts remediations of Shakespeare (particularly for young readers) has its beginnings in the nineteenth-century literary history (as this book has sought to demonstrate). At the same time, and in the interest of enlarging the scope of inquiry into the various remedial strategies deployed, I would suggest that we would do well to consider the state and the nature and status of design within a broader cultural context. The field of inquiry in which this deep engagement with design—which, like Cowden Clarke’s need to confront the contest between autonomy and constraint—finds its most powerful and, some might say potentially disruptive, articulation is provided by the discussions and debates surrounding what in the biological sciences was the centrally important contest between morphology and teleology—the theoretical arguments, that is, concerning the nature of structure and the nature of purpose. These are terms, as I will argue, that arise within mid- to

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late-nineteenth-century biological science—culminating in the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species —but that are operative within other areas of culture, including the emergence of the Arts-Manufacture movement that rose to particular prominence in the middle decades of the nineteenth century (and that exists today in its modern form, industrial design) and that, remarkably, come to play a role in another struggle to theorize a complementary relationship between morphology and teleology within an expansive understanding of the nature of the design of nature. The debates staged between morphology (structure) and teleology (purpose) within the biological sciences are strikingly resonant within these considerations of Cowden Clarke’s struggle in The Girlhood between autonomy and constraint: both discourses enact a negotiation between what on the first appearance seem irreconcilable opposites, but that emerge through certain remedial efforts as two mutually sustaining aspects of a divine design. A word about the design of this chapter. In the following section, I will turn attention to the status of design as a concern in the emergence in mid-century of the Arts-Manufacture movement, a move prompted for me in part by Cowden Clarke’s dedication of her tale, Desdemona, the Magnifico’s Child (the specimen text taken up below in the final section of this chapter) to an artist and popular lecturer intimately associated with the Arts-Manufacture movement, Alexander Christie. This consideration of Arts-Manufacture is also prompted by the role design plays in arguments for and justifications of an increased social investment in the benefits to society promised by Arts-Manufacture. In the following discussion, I begin with Christie and his painting gifted to Mary and Charles Cowden Clarke that prompted the dedication of Desdemona in his honor, then turn to one of the movement’s chief advocates and practitioner, Charles Tomlinson, who charted a projected growth of Arts-Manufacture to a national commitment that would be understood as an expression of something like the national character of nineteenth-century Britain. The link suggested by Christie and Tomlinson between Arts-Manufacture and character is most powerfully expressed in the work of George Wilson, a leading scientific educator and the nation’s first Regius Professor of Technology (at Edinburgh) who not only established himself as perhaps Britain’s leading voice in the call for greater educational and social investment in technology, but also attempted to resolve the morphology-teleology agon through his book, The Character of God, as Inferred from the Study of Human Anatomy (1856). As I argue below, Wilson’s grandiose vision that enshrines design within the

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figure—and character—of God, has its corresponding critical gesture and conclusion in Cowden Clarke’s figure—and character—of Shakespeare. The final section of this chapter returns to Cowden Clarke’s Girlhood and to her Desdemona in particular, for it is in this prequel or history that we witness her most difficult, powerful, and equivocal confrontation with design, offering a striking negotiation between autonomy and constraint, character and destiny. Cowden Clarke’s project posits something like personhood for the young Desdemona that in light of her “after-fate” requires explaining. Yet, as sketched above, Cowden Clarke’s own free agency as author is at the same time constrained by a prior and presiding force that I will call Shakespeare’s design. As was perhaps inevitable in the face of Othello and the Desdemona we encounter there, the form that this explanation takes in Cowden Clarke’s tale is blame: Cowden Clarke is more or less forced by her own understanding of character to create in the childDesdemona those presumed flaws in character that will explain the fate Shakespeare (proleptically) has prepared for her. Because character is fundamental—or, even, sovereign—in her understanding of literary narrative as such, it appears not to occur to Cowden Clarke that Desdemona’s fate in Shakespeare’s play may not be the result of her character at all, whatever its precise nature, but rather the result of the nature of Othello’s. Or Iago’s. Or, apparently still more remote from Cowden Clarke’s perspective, perhaps Desdemona’s fate is a function of prejudice or racism or the corrosive effects of European or Christian biases of various sorts that function well outside the domain of any one individual character or one individual psychology. To the considerable extent to which Cowden Clarke’s work is predicated upon a certain more or less psychologized understanding of the nature of dramatic character and therefore dramatic narrative that appears to follow from the actions of characters in the play, she is disbarred, as it were, from such considerations.

I Cowden Clarke titles the individual tales of Shakespeare’s heroines not by the name of the central character or characters in them alone, but also by a qualifier, thus: Portia; The Heiress of Belmont, or Isabella; the Votaress, or Helena; The Physician’s Orphan. Other tales offer more evaluative titles: Ophelia; The Rose of Elsinor, or Juliet; the White Dove of Venice. Each of the tales has a dedicatee, many of whom were prominent men (and apart from the Shakespeare Association, they are all men) in a variety of fields,

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including law, medicine, theater, painting and the other arts.17 Her prequel to Merry Wives (Meg and Alice; the Merry Maids of Windsor), for instance, is dedicated to Charles Dickens by Cowden Clarke “in token of her faith in his ‘charms,’ moral, intellectual, and social” (Girlhood, 1: 375).18 Others are dedicated to Leigh Hunt (Rosalind and Celia; the Friends ); Charles Knight, “in honour of his Shakespearean labours” (Hermione; the Russian Princess, [Girlhood, 3: 199]); and John Payne Collier, “whose Shakespearean zeal and private courtesy claim her especial acknowledgement” (Viola; the Twin, [Girlhood, 3: 295]).19 Cowden Clarke’s tale Desdemona; The Magnifico’s Daughter is dedicated to the Scottish painter and art lecturer Alexander Christie, “In acknowledgment of the generous gift of his fine picture, ‘Othello’s Despair’” (Girlhood, 1: 287). Christie’s painting (Fig. 6.1) is altogether typical of the literary subjects he took up—Prospero and Miranda Adrift, for instance. In its relationship to Cowden Clarke’s tale of Desdemona, however, this painting is curious and therefore interesting for two reasons. First, the image, while itself an expression of a painterly version of the very character-centric work Cowden Clarke will undertake in her tale of Desdemona, when contrasted to Cowden Clarke’s tale, it is clearly a study of the “wrong” character. Christie’s vision of Othello reflects his understanding of Othello as a play that focuses fundamentally and virtually exclusively upon the representation of a fallen man, magnificent in dress and demeanor, tragic in his abject despair. To the extent that she appears at all, Desdemona here appears metonymically, in the form of her open, dead hand fallen through the bed curtains that otherwise both obscure her entirely and at the same time frame the figure of this “oriental” Othello. It is he who occupies almost the entire canvas and the tragedy on display is his, not Desdemona’s. And while Christie does not go so far as to absolve Othello of his guilt (indeed, “Othello’s Guilt” could well name another such painting, but one with an altogether different understanding of the play), he does little to call our attention to Desdemona, other than as a sign, rather like the handkerchief that figures so importantly in Shakespeare’s play. As will be seen below, this is nearly the antithesis of Cowden Clarke’s vision of the play and her remediation via narrative dilation of it. The second reason why Cowden Clarke’s dedication of her Othello tale to Alexander Christie is interesting moves us toward the matter of design that will be at the heart the Art-Manufacture movement of the mid-nineteenth century. Christie’s lecture The Objects and Purposes of the Art-Manufacture Exhibition appeared together with others by Charles Heath Wilson (one

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Fig. 6.1 Alexander Christie, Othello’s Despair (By permission, University of Leeds)

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of the cofounders in 1843 of the Glasgow School of Design and later biographer of Michelangelo) and George Wilson (to be discussed presently) as Lectures Delivered in the National Galleries, published under the auspices of the Art-Manufacture Association Committee of Management (1857). The general aims of the Art-Manufacture Association and the movement it was meant to champion were educational in nature and nationalist in ambition, with the goal of fostering the development in its audiences of a certain British character based upon practical knowledge of design and arts-manufacture as the new technology that was transforming the civilized world nowhere more powerfully than in Great Britain. We see a prime instance of this in the series of papers edited by the noted scientist (and later a scholar and translator of Dante) Charles Tomlinson, under the title Objects in Art-Manufacture. The prefatory comments to the first paper in the series (which happens to be devoted to the art and manufacture of paper) stress a number of strategies and goals that constitute the general objectives of Arts-Manufacture: the importance of “teaching by means of objects instead of words only” and the use of specimens of the objects under discussion so as to ‘give force and vitality’ to the instruction.”20 A few years later, in 1858, Tomlinson published Illustrations of Useful Arts, Manufactures, and Trades , a book that is both a catalog of the many highly developed arts and manufacture in Great Britain and at the same time as a spur to further action—in particular, the concerted effort to valorize and publicize Britain’s greatness in arts-manufacture, a task that ideally would lead to the founding of an arts-manufacture museum that would do for manufacture what the Museum of Natural History had done for the objects (and beings) of the natural world. In his Introduction, Tomlinson is careful to draw explicit parallels between the natural and the manufactured objects of the world and how they relate to one another as objects of knowledge. As becomes clear quickly, Tomlinson’s goal is to deploy an organizational method that will lead to a greater understanding of the nature of design and to that end begins by conjuring the Museum of Natural History and the “first impression” the observer has there: an awareness of “the method which pervades the whole”: In becoming better acquainted with the animals, the plants, and the minerals which form the collection, he is made aware of the fact that their methodical arrangement is not for the sole purpose of facilitating study, but that such an arrangement actually exists in nature. An attentive examination of their structure, functions, and conditions of being, causes the various groups of natural objects to fall into their places in the chain of being, and leads to

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the solemn conviction that their relationship is the result of method, as their existence is of design.21

Were the same energies to be dedicated for the Useful Arts and Manufactures, Tomlinson argues, the result would be a grand museum that “would most impressively illustrate a considerable portion of the history of civilisation.” This museum would display the vast range of human activity aimed at the transformation of raw materials into “finished products” and would include the tools, machines, models, drawings, and workshops necessary to the manufacture of these objects. Tomlinson also imagines the museum to include a research library for “the use of the student in Technology, as we are now accustomed to term the whole business of the Useful Arts” (Illustrations, ii).22 That Great Britain had yet to assemble this museum and this library “may well excite surprise,” but change is in the air and steps are being taken. Tomlinson’s dream for the future of the Useful Arts and Manufacture is a thoroughly nationalist one, as he points first to the appointment of Professors of Technology in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin, and to the further fact that “collections are being formed in those capitals for the purpose of illustrating their lectures.” But until such time as the Useful Arts and Manufacture museum comes into being—and in order to capitalize on the great expertise of British manufacture—Tomlinson offers his Illustrations: All we hope and purpose to do, is to afford some glimpses of the great result, and arranging the materials placed at our disposal in methodical order, to give the reader correct information so far as it extends, and a desire to know more on a subject, to which, under Providence, our beloved country owes so much of her greatness and prosperity. (Illustrations, iii)23

One of the Professors mentioned by Tomlinson whose appointment he saw as an encouraging sign for the future of the Useful Arts and Manufacture was George Wilson, the same George Wilson who in 1857 had published a lecture with ones by Alexander Christie and Charles Heath Wilson. It was also this George Wilson, Regius Professor of Technology at Edinburgh, who helped to found the Industrial Museum of Scotland and served as its first director, 1855–1859. In addition to his dedication to the Useful Arts and Art-Manufacture, Wilson (a chemist by training) was an early pioneer in the research into color-blindness; he was also a writer, having published a number of biographical studies, including Life of Henry

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Cavendish (1851) and Life of Dr John Reid (1852). Wilson also wrote The Five Gateways of Knowledge, a popular study of the functioning of the human senses, as well as a series of scientific papers in the field of chemistry, and a popular chemistry textbook. Wilson also established a reputation as a public lecturer, which led to a number of publications, including “What is technology,” his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor, and helped generate and sustain popular and professional interest in the founding of the Industrial Museum.24 Wilson’s investment in Useful Arts and Manufacture was of a piece with his scientifically based appreciation of design, a concept—or, perhaps, a belief—founded upon a particular understanding of the relationship between structure and purpose. Wilson’s defense of design provides an important insight into the ways in which mid-nineteenth-century notions of design—as a scientific, religious, and literary concept—are linked to arguments concerning the nature of character. Accordingly, Wilson’s published lecture On the Character of God, as Inferred from the Study of Human Anatomy (1856) becomes essential to the present discussion.25 This work, delivered originally to medical students in Edinburgh, can be said to undertake the most ambitious character study conceivable: not only does Wilson propose to help fashion the proper character of the future medical doctor, but he also grounds this effort on the celebration of the original of character: God himself. And while Wilson’s writings make explicit and clear his religious zeal, in this book the religious sentiment is cast wholly as the consequences of his scientific endeavors; it emerges, as it were, as the conclusion he draws from his work in scientific and medical study, research, and teaching. Although Wilson declares in the opening pages of his lecture that “easy and delightful though the task would be,” he cannot engage in a sustained consideration of “the Argument for Design” (Wilson, 26), the fact is that much of his lecture is given over precisely to this labor. Suggesting that the full-scale demonstration of the truth of the argument for design is “superfluous here,” Wilson offers instead the following observation as something of a point of departure: No sound intellect can avoid perceiving that animals exhibit in their bodies what, for want of a better language, we must call instruments, implements, machinery or apparatus, admirably fitted to produce the effects we every day see them producing. … The inevitable conclusion which must be reached by every honest student of animal structure is, that if eyes were not made

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to see with, hands to work with and feet to walk with, they could not have served better for seeing, working, and walking, had they been made for these purposes. (Wilson, 26–28)

And this conclusion yields in turn to a further insight and understanding: that the manifest evidence provided by the study of natural objects (plant, animal, and human bodies) must open on to an understanding of design. If it is the case that by virtue of the specific details (characteristics) of their structure bodies are always manifesting the purpose for which such bodies can be said to exist, then “who will believe that they were not expressly designed for such purposes?” (Wilson, 28). After concluding this opening discussion by pointing to the undeniability of the fact that “living organisms were designed and constructed by some intelligent Being or Beings” and that this knowledge argues that “the further conclusion cannot well be avoided that the Maker and Maintainer of those wondrous living machines must be God” (Wilson, 33), Wilson is finally prepared to announce his proper subject: “not … to lay the foundation of the argument for design, which time does not allow, but to consider certain alleged contradictions or qualification of it, which the recent progress of biology is declared to have brought to light” (Wilson, 34–35). Such “contradictions or qualifications” of the argument for design that Wilson will attempt to refute must not be allowed to compromise what is clearly obvious to any objective observer of natural objects, especially animal and human bodies—that “every living creature is a monument of divine power, wisdom, and goodness” (Wilson, 36). Indeed, this is the typical response even students of medicine (or science more broadly) will have when contemplating “the wonderfulness of life” (Wilson, 37). It is the encounter with the diseased and particularly the dead body, however, that can initiate the skepticism concerning design that Wilson wishes to defeat. Wilson insists that “[w]e must not lose sight of the glory and gracefulness of the living body, because the aspect of the dead one horrifies us” (Wilson, 38). And, indeed, the very place where “the great lesson of design” can best be learned is precisely in the dissecting-room (Wilson, 39). Wilson’s first target is the notion that disease in the body constitutes the failure of design. Although Wilson will readily (of necessity) admit that he cannot explain either pain or suffering (the latter of which appears especially to disturb Wilson’s equanimity, even as he will “put the thought of pain aside, and look at each diseased body as a watchmaker may look on a deranged chronometer sent to him for repair” [Wilson, 50]), Wilson utterly rejects the notion that disease or even death is evidence of the failure

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of design. The foundational reason for this is his understanding that, even as there are no completely perfect gears within the finest watch, so the fact is that “all human organisms, even the most highly endowed, are imperfect, and only partially fulfill the end for which they were created, so that our proof of design always falls short of an absolute demonstration” (Wilson, 53). Rather than being signs of the failure of design, disease and death instead literally have no bearing on design at all: “It is impossible, then, to neutralise the proofs of design in the structures of the human frame by adducing proofs of imperfection in it” (Wilson, 55). In support, Wilson offers an argument by analogy to the works of man—what we might call the objects of arts-manufacture. He offers the watch as a case in point: It is quite true, that hitherto it has been found impossible to construct a chronometer which shall be an unerring time-keeper, but even an ordinary watch keeps time so well, that all acknowledge it to be a remarkable monument of human power, wisdom, and skill; and though it has been proved equally impossible to discover a human organism without a blemish, and most organisms have many, yet the most blemished among them proclaims itself to have been fearfully and wonderfully made, by none less than the Divine Maker. (Wilson, 56)26

The argument for design is further supported by Wilson pressing this analogy between the works of God and the works of man. Even though we are all “the smitten remnant of the whole race of Adam,” Wilson writes, and “our blood is more or less poisoned by all the distempers which have afflicted the thousands of generations who have gone to premature graves before us,” we nevertheless have achieved marvels: Steamboats, Railroads, Locomotive Engines, Lighthouses, Electric Telegraphs, Crystal Palaces, Lancaster Guns, Floating Batteries! These, and a thousand other things are our handiwork, and they prove that we are more wonderful machines than any one of them, or all of them together. (Wilson, 61)

And to give all this praise a local habitation and a name (by way of example), Wilson names James Watt: “If the steam-engine be a monument to the wisdom, skill, and power of James Watt, what a monument is Watt himself … to the wisdom, skill, and power of God” (Wilson, 61–62). Wilson here establishes an economy of praise built upon the circulation of inventiveness—cast as “wisdom, skill, and power”—that emanates from

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God through his creation of humankind and then recirculates through the objects of arts-manufacture back to God, in a continuous flow of creativity and ingenuity: All man’s works, even his wicked ones, considered simply as shewing inventive and constructive skill, first praise him, and then through him lift a higher praise to God who made him. (Wilson, 62)

These first forty pages of Wilson’s lecture serve as something of a prologue to his discussion of a series of five questions, of which the first two are important here: (1) “Are all the organs, or parts of an animal useful to it?” and (2) “Are all the organs or functions of animals graceful or becoming?”27 To locate these two related questions within the terms of mid-nineteenthcentury biological science and what was perhaps the greatest single debate that seemed to divide scientific opinion into two typically opposed camps, we can rephrase these questions thus: What are the roles of structure and purpose in biological organisms and systems? This is the central debate between strict morphologists, on the one hand for whom structure is the sole object of inquiry (an end in itself), and teleologists, on the other, for whom structure is but the vehicle for realizing purpose. And both sides of this divide—which Wilson seeks to mediate—had particular responses to the argument for design. The effect, Wilson writes, has been a setting of the stage for a great conflict: The controversy has come to a height in the endeavour to marshal against each other, as directly opposing and contradictory systems, the Doctrine of Final Causes or Teleology, and the Doctrine of Unity of Organization, one of the great principles of Morphology. (Wilson, 64)

Indeed, Wilson’s project to a large extent depends upon denying this controversy by erasing the view that morphology and teleology are opposed to each other. While Wilson defers the conclusive argument to those “profound anatomists” who can detail their work and their understanding of the proper relation between structure and purpose, he nevertheless will venture his own response to this dilemma (which he holds to be a false one) from his own particular disciplinary perspective: It is only profound anatomists who can discuss the relative bearings of morphology and teleology, and it would be presumption in me to attempt such a

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discussion. But I may, without presumption, offer you a brief judgment on the question of the compatibility of Morphological generality, with Teleological speciality from a Technologist’s point of view. (Wilson, 65)28

Wilson is now ready to address his central questions, beginning with the matter of usefulness. There are many particular instances of animal organs that apparently have no actual use, an undeniable observation that posed a number of questions to students of biology—not least the question (central to Wilson’s entire discussion) of design. What are we to make of such things, Wilson asks, ventriloquizing other scientists, as “teats in male animals” or “the perfect skeleton-hands tightly bandaged within the fingerless glove of the seal’s flipper” (Wilson, 66)? Does the fact of such organs that seem to have no discernible use or function or benefit explode the argument for design? Wilson does not think so: citing the instance of finding teeth in the jawbones of fetal Greenland whales—animals that after birth actually have no teeth, but rather baleen—Wilson notes that such organs are not hurtful to the animals, nor are they “unbecoming” or “fantastic.” Rather, Wilson says, they bear “the stamp of utility upon them”; he continues: they are in relation to the animal, if I may use the phrase, right things in wrong places, or right things at wrong times in right places. (Wilson, 67)

The presence of such “useless” organs for Wilson cannot be seen, then, to prove that they are “defects or botches” (Wilson, 67). Indeed, these useless organs “exhibit not failure but excess of design” (Wilson, 68).29 Such a statement, which bears on our understanding of teleology—or purpose—is made possible for Wilson precisely by the “profound observations of recent anatomical morphologists” (Wilson, 68–69). It is this comparativist work on structure, undertaken across a wide range of animals (and not, like the traditional work of the teleologist, restricted to a single animal or a single feature in a single animal) that allows Wilson and, he hopes, his readers, to “gladly accept” the new explanation—an explanation provided by new anatomical morphology that “is furnished by a recognition of the fact, that a mighty plan has been followed in the organization of all creatures, no one of which can be understood if studied only by itself” (Wilson, 69). Wilson offers a miniature case study: consider the human hand, the lion’s paw, the bird’s wing, the seal’s flipper, and the fish’s fin. On even a cursory glance, we will see “how admirably well they severally served for handling, grasping, flying, rowing, and swimming.” This far, and no farther, the traditional teleology would take us. But there are questions

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that remain precisely because we will have ignored “many peculiarities of structure unconnected with either good or evil purpose in all of them.” And this is where the “morphological homologist” leads the way: all of these five organs are for the morphologist “modifications of each other.” Accordingly, we might conclude “the wing being a hand with certain of the fingers elongated and expanded, or if we choose so to express it, the hand a wing with fingers shortened and brought close; the flipper a hand with the fingers contracted and bound together, or the hand a flipper treated conversely” (Wilson, 69–70). And here Wilson reaches the heart of the matter altogether: or, best of all, the whole of the organs in question may be looked upon as modifications of one ideal archetypal form, and many of their structural peculiarities may be explained by reference to this relation, which cannot be accounted for by a reference to the use which its living possessor makes of the organ exhibiting them. (Wilson, 70)

In this way no “useless” organ can be strictly useless, since use—particularity of purpose—can only finally be determined by the comparativist study of morphology—unity of structure—that yields a new meaningfulness and, we may say, use. The apparent antagonism between teleology and morphology is thereby eliminated and Wilson can declare with all the enthusiasm of a scientific and religious certainty: I welcome the beautiful discoveries of morphology, as enlarging and exalting not restricting, the domain of teleology. I am the more struck with the proofs of design, when I learn that the Creator has, to speak with all reverence, rendered the task of conferring upon single creatures special endowments more difficult to himself, by making each but an infinitesimal part of one vast harmonious whole, and yet find each separate organism as perfectly endowed to fulfil the end of its being, as if God had had no other creature in the universe to provide for but it. (Wilson, 74)

Wilson continues beyond this moment to address the remaining questions enumerated above, but the fundamental case for design has been made through his work to articulate the complementary nature of morphology and teleology. And it is this innovation—one that was indeed taking place in the biological sciences and was about to become in some ways the dominant question for science and for culture with Darwin’s publication of On The Origin of Species in 1859, just three years after Wilson’s lecture—that

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leads to the stated objective of Wilson’s piece: the desire to deduce the “character of God” from the evidence provided by human anatomy and the study of human anatomy: In summing up this long but imperfect inquiry into the conclusions which the study of human anatomy warrants in reference to the character of God, we have to acknowledge the clearest proofs of power, wisdom, skill, vast purpose, and great mercy as belonging to Him who has made, and who sustains all things. (Wilson, 86)

For Wilson, a recognition of the character of God (“power, wisdom, skill, vast purpose, and great mercy”) represents the culmination of his defense of design, even as God also stands, as it were, as the point of origin of design as such. At the same time, this conclusion (which also refers to the origin, or the original) also marks a destination. For it is Wilson’s didactic objective that his young medical student auditors, and his readers of all description, should take God’s original character as a model for the fashioning of their own. For medical students this means becoming those medical doctors whose faith in a Christian God sustains them through the rigors of their training and practice and that will help them to defend themselves against the slide toward atheism that threatens each time one confronts the diseased or the dying or the dead body. And for his general readers, Wilson’s goal is to inspire their continued and sustaining faith in both God and in the wonderful creations of “Man,” those engines, palaces, Lancaster guns and “a thousand other things [that] are our handiwork” (Wilson, 61). The next step in this chapter’s analysis of design and character requires the consideration of a great transformation accomplished in literary writing: the shift from “character” as a term that means either a set of traits particular to a given individual, on the one hand, to the notion of “character” as a strictly moral category, on the other. The following section of this chapter will take up this matter by returning to the remedial and dilational work of Mary Cowden Clarke in her Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines. It will be the goal of that analysis to trace the ways in which Cowden Clarke undertakes to deploy moral character as the model for the fashioning of fictional characters.

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II Mary Cowden Clarke concludes her Preface to The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines by fulfilling the promise she made at its beginning: to provide an “exculpatory word touching the choice” of the book’s subject (Girlhood, 1: iii). At the close of her brief Preface, Cowden Clarke provides the exculpatory gesture that can be summarized in a single word, Love: “My exculpatory word—my word in extenuation—is this. I beseech my readers to believe that love, not presumption, prompted the subject of this series of stories.” She then offers a passage from Tennyson’s great elegy: Not mine the sweetness or the skill, But mine the love that will not tire; And, born of love, the vague desire That spurs an imitative will. “In Memoriam” (Girlhood, 1: iv)

It is an interesting gesture that Cowden Clarke offers here by way of exculpation, not least because it creates the opportunity for her profession of love—an emotional reaction to Shakespeare’s plays that not only is shared, presumably, by Cowden Clarke’s readers, but that also is cast as responsible for producing in Cowden Clarke the almost involuntary “will” to write the girlhoods of Shakespeare’s women. The quotation from Tennyson’s poem, moreover, can be said to reinforce by reenacting the “imitative will” altogether, since Cowden Clarke “speaks” Tennyson’s lines that themselves suggest a certain inevitability: that from such great love arises, as a matter almost of nature, the corresponding will to imitate. In offering this, of course, Cowden Clarke is not only imitating but also appropriating Tennyson in an attempt to extenuate any criticism that might come her way for taking upon herself the task of imagining the prequels to the lives of Shakespeare’s heroines—or writing a collection of stories effectively in Shakespeare’s name. This is a strategy that mimes the strategy enacted in the Tennyson lines themselves in a section of In Memoriam devoted to an extended depiction of the character of the lost A.H.H. (Arthur Henry Hallam): “Heart-affluence in discursive talk” (109.1), “Seraphic intellect” (109.5), “High nature amorous of the good” (109.9), and “manhood fused with female grace” (109.17), and so forth.30 Tennyson then depicts the power of A.H.H.’s discursive talk to overwhelm his auditors with such delight that the old man forgets his weakness, the proud man is “disarm’d of pride” (110.6), “The stern were mild when thou wert by” (110.9),

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and the “flippant” and the “brazen fool” (110.10, 11) are charmed out of countenance, if not character. And the narrator? He glows in his friend’s “graceful tact” and “Christian art” (110.16). But the narrator knows full well that it is only his love of his friend that he can claim as his own, not himself possessed of “the sweetness or the skill” (110.17) that defines the beloved’s “converse” (110.1). But it is this love that is crucial, because it is love and a tirelessness that best becomes profound love, that “spurs an imitative will” (110.20). Even as the narrator of Tennyson’s elegy is not the hero that A.H.H. was, so too Cowden Clarke—taking refuge in Tennyson’s poetic precedent—is not Shakespeare. Indeed, the entire gesture enacts a series of defenses that serve to insulate Cowden Clarke—behind imitation, behind love, behind Tennyson, and behind Shakespeare. Fittingly, the last words in Cowden Clarke’s Preface are Shakespeare’s, a quotation that—given its setting within the context of her desire to extenuate—amounts to a virtual adaptation of Theseus’s lines prior to the performance of Pyramus and Thisbe to be staged by Quince, Bottom, and the other mechanicals in the final act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Never anything can be amiss When simpleness and duty tender it; …… And what poor duty cannot do, Noble respect takes it in might, not merit. (Girlhood, 1: iv)

And this, too, is an interesting—because ambiguous—gesture offered by way of exculpation or extenuation. Given Cowden Clarke’s status as author of a work designed to produce a set of readerly reactions, it is altogether curious that the lines she quotes and with which she ends her Preface (and thereafter “disappears” from the scene) should come from a character in Shakespeare who is not an author and who is speaking quite clearly about another’s work or performance. In other words, Cowden Clarke-asTheseus speaks not as author, but as audience: Any flaws in the performance we are about to see—or any narrative history we are about to read—will be forgiven because of the spirit in which the performance is offered. Noblesse oblige. What this amounts to, of course, is Cowden Clarke attempting to instruct her readers on the proper nature of their relationship to her work and, moreover, the “noble” duty they have to accept the work—and even such flaws as it may have (and that there are egregious flaws in Pyramus and Thisbe is certainly Theseus’s understanding after witnessing it)—in the

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spirit of love that prompts the work in the first place. This is not an altogether unfamiliar gesture, but it is a rather coercive one.31 Given the nature of Cowden Clarke’s self-appointed task to provide the prehistory of Shakespeare’s heroines, and (as she says in the Preface) to stay well clear of the key events depicted in Shakespeare’s play (“all climax in incident and sentiment was to be carefully avoided throughout these stories,—inasmuch as they are merely preliminaries to catastrophes already ordained” [Girlhood, 1: iii–iv]), virtually her entire tale constitutes an elaborate and extended act of dilation. But Cowden Clarke’s is not an unfettered freedom. One of the most interesting matters in play here is the very significant degree to which Cowden Clarke is constrained by Shakespeare’s play, even as she clearly has the freedom to invent and create and conjecture and speculate—free, that is, to dilate. The “catastrophes” Cowden Clarke must keep clearly in sight serve not only as endpoints to her narratives, they also serve to structure her narratives, especially to the extent that the outcomes for her heroines are preordained by Shakespeare’s design and Cowden Clarke’s great challenge in her stories is to maintain probability of outcome. It just would not do for Cowden Clarke to depict a Rosalind or Portia or Lady Macbeth who—by the measure of Shakespeare’s design—would be to be out of character. Cowden Clarke’s dilation of Desdemona’s story as designed—or, perhaps, caused—by Shakespeare reflects certain concerns with the nature of character in relation to an imagined or hypothetical “life” that exceeds the parameters of the source text. For Cowden Clarke, that dilated life takes the form of a story principally but not exclusively of the young Desdemona, for Cowden Clarke is (as critics have argued recently) heavily invested in the story of her family as well and the ways in which her family history—particularly the complicated interactions between her father and her mother and the lamentable legacy of imperfection that those interactions engendered—served to fashion her own character. For Sarah Barber, Cowden Clarke’s deepest investment in designing her Girlhood lies precisely in the tales providing carefully calibrated critiques of poor and inadequate parenting, negative examples, as it were, against which proper (Victorian) parenting can be imagined. To these ends, Barber argues, Cowden Clarke “creates extra-Shakespearean mothers and fathers whose lessons, good and bad, shape the heroines’ characters,” an act that arises from a fundamentally pedagogical impetus: If we really seek the feminist implications of The Girlhood, we will find them here rather than in its treatment of sex, for it is the educational role these

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parental figures play and not their actual advice that allows [Cowden] Clarke to promote the plays as suitable reading material for young women. (Barber, 812)

Critics have written powerfully in response to this pedagogical drive in The Girlhood, identified by Gail Marshall as something akin to a “maternal intervention” shared by many mid-century women writers seeking to negotiate a productive relationship to Shakespeare: The girl in early adolescence would seem to be the reader at whom Cowden Clarke was aiming, and who was perhaps most in need of guidance at that critical stage of life, and hence Shakespeare and the figure of the mother combine to try to produce the young woman of good taste and good sense to whom Cowden Clarke writes.32

For her part, Cowden Clarke—in her first publication on Shakespeare—credits her lifelong love of the poet to the early influence of her own mother, as it was she “who first inspired me with a love of all that is good and beautiful, and who therefore may well be said to have originated my devotion to Shakespeare.”33 It is interesting to note, as well, that much later in life, in her 1896 autobiography, My Long Life: An Autobiographical Sketch, Cowden Clarke returns not only to Shakespeare and other “favourite old books,” but to the memory of her mother and her influence, this time crediting her mother with the wisdom to know what not to read: Speaking of literary pursuits, I may mention that much of my reading, latterly, has been peering into favourite old books with sparing perusal of modern ones; and I refer to the fact of my retaining the conscientiousness that was encouraged in me by my dear mother while I was a child, for the sake of showing how in old age the same characteristic exists. A volume of farces, which has its table of contents marked by her with a penciled cross against those pieces she forbade me to read, has caused me never to peruse those particular farces. Coarseness has ever been my abhorrence; for well does Shelley say in his noble ‘Defence of Poetry,’ –‘Obscenity is blasphemy against the divine beauty in life’ … .34

This interest in maternal influence is clear in many of Cowden Clarke’s tales, including her prehistory of Othello: Desdemona, the Magnifico’s Child. This tale—one that is seldom taken up at any length in the recent criticism

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(which tend to focus more attention on the stories of Portia, Katharine, and Lady Macbeth)—not only affords an important perspective on the matter of both maternal and paternal influence on the young heroines, but also stands as a key text in Cowden Clarke’s negotiation of the problem of design made visible in the tale’s adjudication of the struggle between autonomy and constraint. These constraints within which Cowden Clarke is forced to work are a function of Shakespeare’s design of Othello: Cowden Clarke’s Desdemona must be chaste, honorable, loyal, and completely innocent—terms established by her (Desdemona’s) narrative in Shakespeare’s play. Cowden Clarke is not free to craft a lascivious Desdemona, for example, or a Desdemona who would be likely to take Cassio for a lover, and so forth. In other words, Cowden Clarke’s work as a writer is bounded by Shakespeare’s text as something of a final cause. Her work, that is, is determined teleologically by Shakespeare’s and as such Shakespeare and his design stand in relation to Cowden Clarke very like God’s relation to His works: they are the originals that engender the imitative will and inspire remedial responses in kind. Cowden Clarke’s tale begins well before Shakespeare’s, and well before, even, the birth of Desdemona—with the image of a young man in a gondola gliding on Venetian waters. This young man wears mourning clothes, for his father has recently died. But curiously, this young man’s countenance is not darkened with the shadow of grief, but is rather “radiant with hopeful happy thoughts” (Girlhood, 1: 289). The reason for this radiance and hope is quickly revealed: his father was “so unreasonable a tyrant … that his decease was felt to be emancipation from slavery, rather than a loss and a sorrow.” What is more, the young man was by the death of this tyrant father on his way “to claim the dearest privilege of human liberty—choice in love, in marriage,—which had hitherto been denied to him” (Girlhood, 1: 289). In fairytale fashion, the young man’s chosen bride is a virtuous beauty from a poor family, but because of her humble origins and because of the tyrannical father, both parties kept their marriage a secret until such a time as the young man would be free to reveal it to the world. We learn in due course (Cowden Clarke withholds his name for nearly a dozen pages) that this man is the young Brabantio, and his young bride the lovely Erminia. We learn, too, that her virtuous father is blind and that Erminia’s brother Gratiano is reported lost in a recent naval battle. Cowden Clarke has begun to set the stage (as it were); we have already encountered patterns that will extend throughout the tale and that have a bearing on Shakespeare’s play: absent mothers, tyrannical fathers, men or argosies presumably lost at sea,

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and the explicitly sanctioned value and virtue of marrying freely for true love. But the course of true love is never easy and trouble rears immediately. For as he approaches her house he sees Erminia through the “trellised window” in the arms of another man. The following paragraph details the traumatic scene that foretells so much of the rest of the tale—and at the same time offers a sufficient sample of Cowden Clarke’s narrative style: He darted up the narrow staircase, and burst into the chamber. With one torrent of incoherent reproach and grief he relieved his full heart; and, scarcely heeding that his abrupt appearance and vehement words so overwhelmed his wife with terror, that she stood speechless, gazing at him, unable to articulate one word, he flung out of the room again as suddenly as he had entered, rushed down the stairs, leaped into his boat, and signed to the gondolier to speed away. (Girlhood, 1: 294)

The fairytale, now in the model of a nightmare, continues: the stranger is discovered to be Gratiano, who has not died at sea; the commotion rouses Erminia’s aged and blind father who is shocked and frightened to discover her collapsed on the floor but is comforted at least to be reunited with his son. Erminia then awakes from her swoon—but only because she has spontaneously been delivered of a child (“in the imperious demand to bestow life, the young girl was recalled from her death-like trance”); in the face of these events, Erminia’s father, “smitten to the heart with the thought of shame, dishonor, disgrace” “clasped his hands, bowed his head, yielded to the stroke, and died as he sat” (Girlhood, 1: 296). And thusly has the infant Desdemona inauspiciously entered the world. In response to Erminia’s pleading, Gratiano accomplishes the task of reconciling Brabantio to her, though no sooner is this achieved than Gratiano “disappeared; and for many years, was neither seen nor heard of there” (Girlhood, 1: 302). Cowden Clarke grants the little family some months of happiness, but so great is Erminia’s selflessness in deference to all of Brabantio’s desires that he eventually grows arrogant and disdainful—so much so, in fact, that he becomes “scarcely less imperious, or less of a domestic tyrant than [his own] father” (Girlhood, 1: 304). But Erminia’s love is such that she obeys Brabantio in all things “to the letter; but to the letter only. In the spirit, it was soon broken through” (Girlhood, 1: 309). Cowden Clarke elaborates on this interesting ability of Erminia to obey the letter of the mandate but not its spirit—and hints subtly about the consequences of such an ability:

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Instead of the honest remonstrance, the modest yet plain representation,—which surely beseem a wife, when reasoning a point with a husband …—there was in the lady Erminia’s conduct a subserviency, a temporizing, which will too often take the place of candour in a timid woman. When such a woman is treated authoritively, without the rational confidence which should give weight to authority, and which is needed by a timid nature to encourage it in a return of confidence, and in the sincerity it would fain preserve, she is apt to become a moral coward, an equivocator—well, if not a deceiver. (Girlhood, 1: 309–10)

Cowden Clarke is quick to read the moral lesson in this failing of Erminia, made all the more troubling in that she succeeds in passing on to her daughter Desdemona precisely the same moral failing, the absence of which would have been sufficient “to make her as perfect a being as ever existed” (Girlhood, 1: 311). Cowden Clarke spells out this moral failing in both mothering and in character: Could the lady Erminia have taught [Desdemona] the honesty as well as modesty of innocence,—the unflinching candour which ought to belong to goodness and greatness,—have inspired the courage of transparent truth, she would have invested her daughter with a panoply that would have proved her best protection against the diabolical malignity by which she was one day to be assailed, and borne her scathless through the treachery which wrought her fate. (Girlhood, 1: 311)35

To be sure, Cowden Clarke insists that Erminia’s is a sin (as it were) of omission: she was not, after all, likely “to communicate to her child, that of which she herself was not only unpossessed, but unconsciously devoid.” And while the true source of Erminia’s shortcoming—and Desdemona’s in turn—is Brabantio himself (Cowden Clarke says that Erminia “had not the remotest notion that her husband’s violent temper had destroyed in hers that firmness and fearlessness which should accompany rectitude” [Cowden Clarke, 311]), it is nevertheless the case that Cowden Clarke seems willing to lay immediate blame on these women: Accustomed to see her mother yield in silence even to things in which she did not acquiesce; to see her avoid doing what she tacitly seemed to agree to; to see her evade what she would not object to, and, although she never blamed or opposed in speech, yet quietly condemned and set aside by act—or rather by non-performance; apparently consenting and approving, but in fact frus-

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trating and censuring by a system of silent passiveness; the little girl insensibly acquired just such a system of conduct. (Girlhood, 1: 311–12)36

Cowden Clarke’s tale continues: we witness Desdemona growing into young womanhood, the death of Erminia, the sudden and secret return of Gratiano to Venice, and (only some twenty pages before the end of the tale) the introduction of Othello.37 As required by Shakespeare’s design, Desdemona rejects all suitors who apply to her, including “that lackadaisicallooking gentleman” Roderigo—whom one of Cowden Clarke’s minor characters says Brabantio holds in contempt for his “mean birth,” but even more for his “mean soul.” He is, the description continues, “a poor, silly, worthless, characterless character” (Girlhood, 1: 354). And as also decreed by Shakespeare’s design, Othello tells his stories of military exploits and Desdemona comes to love him for them. The only character in Cowden Clarke’s tale who detects the subtle signs of Desdemona’s love of Othello is her uncle Gratiano; he sees beyond her strange stiffness of Desdemona’s reactions to Othello; he sees in her face when Brabantio is absent, all the signs of “the avidity with which she devoured every word that was falling from the speaker’s lips” (Girlhood, 1: 367). And it is exactly the space between Desdemona’s public reaction to Othello and her own private one that catches not only Gratiano’s attention, but Cowden Clarke’s too. For in this space Cowden Clarke sees the damning flaw in Erminia return in the form of Desdemona’s “dissimulation”: These evidences of imperfect sincerity, of a want of consistent candour and openness in the character of the otherwise perfect Desdemona, gave her uncle inexpressible pain. He could but too well account for them. He knew the irrational wilfulness of her father too well, to be at a loss for their source. He saw, that the overbearing temper of Brabantio had induced this undue timidity in his daughter; had taught her a shrinking terror of giving offense, which insensibly, and almost inevitably, degenerated into dissimulation. By generous usage, by tenderness, by confidence, by sensible and candid treatment, the gentle Desdemona might have been won to extreme openness and sincerity,—she might have been made as perfect in ingenuousness, as, by nature, she possessed every other qualification to form a model of womanhood. As it was, that one fatal defect but too certainly existed. (Girlhood, 1: 367–68)38

Gratiano continues to notice these signs, together with Desdemona’s coveting of a certain handkerchief with “curious arabesques of the flowered border” and the “strawberries spotted over the center” (Girlhood,

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1: 371). The uncle can only watch and wait and, as designed by Shakespeare and dutifully copied by Cowden Clarke, the news soon wakes the entire household one night announcing Desdemona’s elopement. Cowden Clarke concludes the tale with Desdemona’s line quoted from Othello in which she announces her filial duty to Brabantio but forcefully subordinates it to her new duty to her new lord. The final lines of the tale—in a manner we have come rather to suspect of such remediations—refers the rapt reader to the poet’s original text: What follows farther of the ‘downright violence and storm of fortunes’ that befel Desdemona, is ‘trumpeted to the world’ by the Poet. ‘I pray you, hear ‘him’ speak.’ (Girlhood, 1: 372)

On the one hand, this conclusion satisfies in part because it is conventional and provides the more or less expected deferential appeal to Shakespeare as something of the final word, or authority, in the matter of the ultimate dispensations meted out at the end of his play. The Shakespeare telos prevails. By its design, and as amplified through Cowden Clarke’s “maternal influence” in the tale, her readers adopt (so Cowden Clarke’s design would have it) the lesson of Desdemona’s fate: that excessive timidity is the ready and easy way to deception which is inevitably self-destructive. As she will write near the end of her life, reaffirming Shakespeare’s design in the final scene of Othello: To the very last, Shakespeare has preserved the characteristic softness of disposition in Desdemona which leads her to swerve from truth; though, in this instance, it is not to shield herself, but to screen him she loves from blame and punishment. When she is found dying by her mistaken husband’s hand and Emilia exclaims, ‘Oh, who hath done this deed?’ Desdemona, with her last breath, replies:– Nobody; I myself. Farewell: Commend me to my kind lord; O farewell! (“Friend,” 361)

This assertion of Desdemona’s culpability in her own murder is wholly consistent with Cowden Clarke’s characterization in her tale, from Ermina as the well-intentioned but fundamentally flawed mother, to Desdemona who cannot have helped but to absorb her own mother’s essential character flaw. It is also in perfect keeping with Cowden Clarke’s tendency, on display

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throughout The Girlhood, to depict insufficient or inadequate parents. The solution for Cowden Clarke is to provide the better parent through her tales and their remediation of their great original. As Barber writes, “Bad mothers and fathers allow [Cowden] Clarke to locate the ideal parent elsewhere: for [Cowden] Clarke, that ideal is the Shakespeare-father” (Barber, 821).39 The notion of Shakespeare as father tips easily toward a nearly literal reading of the “divine Shakespeare” that has long characterized the act of reading of Shakespeare as the adoration of Shakespeare. We see glimpses of this in Cowden Clarke and her love of the poet that helped to determine so much of the shape of her life and career. Discussing the “worship of Shakespeare that permeate[d] Mary’s life and work,” Marshall and Thompson note the numerous representations of Shakespeare (in various media) crowded the Cowden Clarke home and especially the Shakespeare portrait that hung, together with her mother’s, beside her bed, the former inscribed with Agrippa’s the line from Antony and Cleopatra, “A rarer spirit never did steer humanity” (Marshall and Thompson, 86).40 “What a divine face it is!” Cowden Clarke enthuses, “It is a fitting external interpretation of the brain that formed it. ‘How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! … in apprehension how like a god!” (Letters, 65). And, as befits a god, this face sees all and comforts all: It is one of those portraits that look at you, and I have a strange fancy for turning toward it whenever anything vexes or perplexes my spirit; the expression of those bland, benignant eyes full of intelligence, and that mouth, full of sweetness and sensibility, seem to have a supernatural power of reaching any sympathizing with poor humanity and consoling its struggles, with their divine influence. (Letters, 65)41

For Marshall and Thompson, this devotional profession of faith (as I might term it) is especially noteworthy, indicating, as it does, a power and conviction that exceeds more typical professions of the love of Shakespeare: In this language, the familiar, indeed well-worn, trope of the divinity of Shakespeare is invested with an emotional vitality that reinvigorates the clichéd words. More New Testament Messiah than Old Testament tyrant, this Shakespeare provides succor in moments of despair and confirmation of the best aspirations and possibilities of humanity. (Marshall and Thompson, 86–87)

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Moreover, this “trope of divinity” that is virtually literalized in Cowden Clarke’s Girlhood (and her various articles on Shakespeare more generally) not only informs her pedagogical ambition in crafting the prehistory of the heroines, but culminates in something like a divine power that subsumes the whole world. Writing about the design of The Girlhood that encourages its young readers “to give themselves up, through identification with one of his characters, to his own ethical intelligence,” Juliet Fleming argues that “Shakespeare, it seems, is morally efficacious not because his portraits are uniformly good, but because of his ability to effect a logic of identification whose object is finally himself.”42 On the other hand, however, the deference to Shakespeare signaled in the closing lines of Desdemona perhaps cuts another way altogether. Perhaps Cowden Clarke turns the reader over to Shakespeare as one final way that she can identify responsibility—in this case, the responsibility for the design of the story of Desdemona to which she has had to hold faith but that leads to Desdemona’s death. This is a matter wholly in Shakespeare’s hands. As such, this closing gesture provides a moment of resentment and a point of resistance. It is generally customary to treat the remedial relationship as a wholly positive one in which a later author offers a kind of homage to the earlier author in the form of an adaptation. According to the dictates of the standard model, the two authors abide within a positive and mutually sustaining relationship of the sort on display in the Lambs’ retellings. Indeed, the adaptive author typically professes her or his admiration of the earlier author in a gesture that stands as a nearly universal feature of the form itself. And yet, with Cowden Clarke’s Desdemona as one compelling instance of a mark of autonomy even in the face of constraint, the terms of the remedial author’s relationship to her original is opened for renegotiation.43 Cowden Clarke is playing a double game here: as Fleming has argued, The Girlhood “represents a filial model of criticism that, loving its object, seeks first to ‘restore’ and then to be erased by Shakespeare’s prior truth” (Fleming, 13). At the same time, Cowden Clarke’s act of remediating Shakespeare—the act, that is, of speaking in Shakespeare’s name—cuts across the grain of “filial” constraint and begins to outline the possibility of a resistant autonomy.

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Notes 1. Mary Cowden Clarke, “Shakespeare as the Girl’s Friend,” Shakespeariana 4 (1887): 355–69, 369; originally published in The Girl’s Own Paper, 8 (1886–1887): 562–64, 562. 2. As will be addressed briefly in the Conclusion, below, Clarke also collaborated with her husband in writing a massive study of Shakespeare’s works, with particular attention paid to style (very broadly defined), The Shakespeare Key: Unlocking the Treasures of His Style, Elucidating the Peculiarities of his Construction, and Displaying the Beauties of His Expression, Forming a Companion to “The Complete Concordance to Shakespeare” (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1879). 3. Mary Cowden Clarke, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines in a Series of Fifteen Tales (London: Smith & Son and Simpkin, Marshall, & Co., 1850–1852), 3 vols; 1: iii. 4. Cowden Clarke was an innovator in other significant ways, as well, especially regarding Shakespeare: her Concordance (1844–1845) was the first comprehensive such work on all of Shakespeare. Cowden Clarke was also the first woman to edit the works of Shakespeare with the 1860 publication of an American edition. Cowden Clarke would also write an autobiography late in her life, entitled My Long Life: An Autobiographical Sketch (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1896). For a useful discussion of Cowden Clarke, see in Women Reading Shakespeare, 1660–1900: An Anthology of Criticism, eds. Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 87–103. 5. The criticism (and history) of character criticism is substantial; among many others, see the recent reassessment Shakespeare and Character: Theory, History, Performance, and Theatrical Persons, eds. Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 6. Sarah Annes Brown, “The Prequel as Palinode: Mary Cowden Clarke’s The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines ,” Shakespeare Survey 58 (2005), 95–106, 95. 7. Cowden Clarke’s reputation is enjoying a resurgence currently, a fact neatly summarized by Kate Chedgzoy, in her article “The Girlhood of Mary Cowden Clarke,” in Women Making Shakespeare: Text, Reception, Performance, eds. Gordon McMullan, Lena Cowen Orlin, and Virginia Mason Vaughan (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2014), 153–62: Highly respected as a scholar and popular as a writer in her own time, later mocked by an academy unsympathetic to amateur female scholarship, Mary Cowden Clarke is once more being taken seriously as a formative influence on Victorian perceptions of and responses to Shakespeare (Chedgzoy, 153)

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Chedgzoy cites key moments in this recuperation, including the appearance of Cowden Clarke in Women Reading Shakespeare, 1660–1900, eds. Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) and an essay on Cowden Clarke by Ann Thompson and Gail Marshall in Great Shakespeareans, vol. VII: Jameson, Cowden Clarke, Kemble, Cushman, ed. Gail Marshall (London and New York: Continuum, 2011), 58–91. See also; Laura Tosi, “How Many Children Read Lady Macbeth?: Prose Versions of the Scottish Play from the Lambs to Young Adult Novels,” The Shakespeare International Yearbook 13 (2013): 73–92; and Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts, “Mary Cowden Clarke: Marriage, Gender and the Victorian Woman Critic of Shakespeare,” in Victorian Shakespeare, Volume 2: Literature and Culture, eds. Gail Marshall and Adrian Poole (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 170–89. Another sign of this resurgence: the 2009 publication of a print edition of The Girlhood by Cambridge University Press, followed in 2010 by an electronic version. 8. Brown quotes Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 212. Auerbach continues: By stretching their lives back to widely divergent girlhoods, emphasizing their independent destinies at an age which ignores the finalities of marriage, Clarke highlights the vivid individualities of the heroines, allowing us to forget their common fate (Auerbach, 213)

9.

10. 11. 12.

Auerbach also discusses both Cowden Clarke and Anna Jameson’s earlier collection (to which Cowden Clarke seems clearly indebted), Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical (London: Saunders and Otley, 1832). Sarah Barber, “Parenting Young Readers with The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines ,” SEL 53.4 (Autumn 2013): 809–27, 818. In a way similar to Brown’s notion of the “gap between the text and the intertext,” Barber sees Cowden Clarke’s prequel as existing between Shakespeare’s play and the scene of the young girl’s reading: “It places its version of the heroines’ lives between the young reader and the Shakespearean text” (Barber, 818), a gesture that enables or empowers the girl reader to determine which character traits to imitate and which to avoid. Gail Marshall, Great Shakespeareans: Volume VII: Jameson, Cowden Clarke, Kemble, Cushman (New York and London: Continuum, 2011), 8. Gail Marshall and Ann Thompson, “Mary Cowden Clarke,” in Great Shakespeareans: Volume VII, Gail Marshall ed., 58–91, 67. Lauren Byler, “Loose Characters in Mary Cowden Clarke’s The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines ,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 57 (Fall 2015): 343–88, 346. Byler quotes from Gail Marshall, Shakespeare

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15. 16.

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and Victorian Women (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 61. Byler invokes in order to adapt a formulation from Judith Butler, thus: “the morals of these prequels and the ideal feminine character modeled by their heroines are ‘always displaced by the very repetition that sustains [them]’” (Byler, 346); see Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 13–31, 18. The model Byler has in mind for identification is a “corporate” one, suggesting that Cowden Clarke “regarded the development of character as a process of accretion, of selective and multiple emulation of other (sometimes fictional) people, which defines personhood not as a hermetic, highly individual state but rather as a piecemeal process of incorporation” (Byler, 347). Jennifer Higginbotham, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Sisters: Gender, Transgression, Adolescence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 5–6. There is as well a generic component that informs the emergence of character as essential, as the sine qua non of Shakespeare’s plays. One of the innumerable consequences of the emergence of the novel—that form conceived as resolutely private (as opposed to the essentially public nature of the theater) that not only is dedicated to the articulation of character but also addresses itself, as it were, to the character of its reader—is the gradual emergence of the idea that characters in novels may lay claim to an individual and authentic identity that exceeds the bounds of the novel itself. An especially apposite instance of this, given the present discussion, is the publication in 1756 of the anonymous novel The Paths of Virtue Delineated; or, the History in Miniature of the Celebrated Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison Familiarized and Adapted to the Capacities of Youth As attested by this example, Richardson’s novels—and especially the heroines or heroes at their heart—inspired his readers to translate character into person, a necessary step to the act of delineating their lives outside the covers of the book. See Lynne Vallone, Disciplines of Virtue: Girls’ Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, “Girlhood,” in Keywords for Children’s Literature, eds. Philip Nel and Lissa Paul (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 94. As she describes in My Long Life, Cowden Clarke had from her earliest years become acquainted with a great many of the illustrious and notable figures of the period, including the Lambs (especially Mary, who was for a while her tutor), Leigh Hunt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, William Hazlitt, Mendelsohn, Coleridge, Emerson, Mrs. Gaskell, and Charles Dickens (among others).

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18. This dedication concludes, “By His ‘QUONDAM QUICKLY’ of 1848,” a reference to Cowden Clarke having played the role of Mistress Quickly in a series of amateur performances of Merry Wives in Dickens’ theatrical troupe; see My Long Life and Recollections of Writers (London, 1878), written with Charles Cowden Clarke. 19. As is well known, John Payne Collier’s “Shakespearean zeal” became too much for him and led to the infamous Perkins Folio forgeries. 20. Charles Tomlinson, Objects in Art-Manufacture, Issue No. 1—Paper (London, 1854), n.p. Issue No. 1—Paper provides a comprehensive introduction to the study and manufacture of paper, beginning with an etymological account of the word itself, and including chapters dedicated to the “History of Artificial Paper” (which begins with a founding definition: “Paper, as we now understand it, is an artificial film of almost any fibrous vegetable matter, made by pounding or tearing that matter with water into a pulp, spreading it on a kind of sieve, draining off the water from it, and drying it” [Tomlinson, 8]), “Paper-making by Hand,” “Paper-Making by Machinery,” “Properties and Applications of Paper,” and “Ornamentation of Paper.” Tomlinson includes a wide range of graphics—from tables cataloging standard sizes and weights (“Sizes and Weights of English Paper”) and measures of the “modus of tenacity” of various types of paper (Scotch banknote paper, Writing-papers, Printing-paper, and Pink blotting-paper) to diagrams of apparatuses for the hand crafting of paper (“Laid mould and Deckle”) or for its manufacture by machines (“Principle of Dickinson’s Paper-Making Machine”). Tomlinson adds to his work the very objects of the manufacture of paper his book has been dedicated to explaining. The final page of the book offers an inventory of these objects: “Yellow wove (see the paper on which this pamphlet is printed); Cream laid; Blue wove, with Water-mark; Blotting water-leaf; Pulp-stained (see Wrapper); Surfacestained; Strong paper (capable of supporting 2 cwt); Straw paper; Brown paper; Sugar paper; Tracing (Papier vegetal); Marble paper, curl and comb pattern.” These “Specimens” were included with Issue No. 1—Paper, evidently in an enclosed envelope, for the purposes of hands-on instruction with the objects of art-manufacture themselves. The British Library copy of Issue No. 1—Paper has unfortunately lost its Specimens, though the impression of the envelope that once contained them is clearly visible in the final pages of book. 21. Charles Tomlinson, Illustrations of Useful Arts, Manufactures, and Trades (London, 1858), ii. 22. In 1868, with the realization of this dream for the museum no closer, Tomlinson published what we might today consider a virtual museum in the form of his Cyclopedia of Useful Arts, Mechanical and Chemical, Manufactures, Mining, and Engineering. One of its scores of steel engravings is titled “Interior of the Great Industrial Exhibition, 1851” and stands as per-

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haps the closest representation of the vision of the museum that Tomlinson had and for which he worked with such dedication. Tomlinson’s book is divided into thirty-two chapters, each dedicated to an object or a process of arts-manufacture; a sample: Cotton, Silk, Hosiery, Leather, Mining Operations, Steel and Casting in Iron and Steel, Manufactures in Iron, Artificial Illumination—Gas, Salt, Soda, Sugar. Each chapter is accompanied by two pages of illustrations germane to each object or process. The Industrial Museum of Scotland went through a number of mergers and other transformations through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and continues today as part of the National Museums of Scotland. The book in which Wilson’s lecture appears is Addresses to Medical Students Delivered at the Instance of the Edinburgh Medial Missionary Society, 1855–1856 (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1856), 24–99. This small collection includes several other lectures by various writers, including Andrew Wood, President of the Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh. Wilson’s next paragraph manifests a certain insistence upon his dogmatic point: “You must now then abandon faith in design,” he writes. “Disease is disease, and imperfection is imperfection, but design is also design” (Wilson, 56). Wilson’s other three questions address, in different ways, matters relating to injuries—either inflicting them on other creatures or having them inflicted upon ourselves: 3. “Are any of the organs or functions of our bodies, hurtful, painful, or injurious to us?” (Wilson, 78); 4. “Are we or other creatures so endowed as necessarily to inflict suffering and premature death on other creatures when obeying our instincts” (Wilson, 79–80); and 5. “Are we, including other living creatures, so organised as to resist the injurious influence of atmospheric and other external agencies?” (Wilson, 83). In support of his understanding of the complementary relationship between morphology and teleology, Wilson reminds his medical student auditors (and readers) that “many of the greatest living morphologists, such as Richard Owen and John Goodsir, find the fullest harmony between morphology and teleology” (Wilson, 65). In an interesting reference, Wilson turns to Shakespeare’s Richard III at this point, arguing that the disposition of useless organs does not “entitle us to pass upon the creatures exhibiting them the judgment which Richard III passed upon himself: ‘I that am curtailed of this fair proportion,/Cheated of feature by dissembling nature;/Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time/Into this breathing world, scarce half made up’” (Wilson, 67). Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, in Tennyson’s Poetry, ed. Robert W. Hill, Jr. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 119–95. There is a further matter worth mentioning in connection to Cowden Clarke-as-Theseus: The exact sense of the lines quoted—especially the final

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two: “And what poor duty cannot do,/Noble respect takes it in might, not merit”—is a notoriously unclear moment in the play. As one indication of the unstable nature of the line, I refer to Samuel Johnson’s commentary in his 1765 edition of Shakespeare’s works: The sense of this passage, as it now stands, if it has any sense, is this: What the inability of duty cannot perform, regardful generosity receives as an act of ability, though not of merit. The contrary is rather true: What dutifulness tries to perform without ability, regardful generosity receives as having the merit, though not the power, of complete performance. We should therefore read, And what poor duty cannot do, Noble respect takes not in might, but merit (vol. 1, 163).

32. Gail Marshall, Shakespeare and Victorian Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 21. See also Chedgzoy (note #7, above) for an important discussion of Cowden Clarke’s own childhood and the importance in it of the Novello familial setting, especially in relation to the education it provided by means of books and reading. Chedgzoy notes that Cowden Clarke was “at pains to explain that though her parents ‘were bountiful in providing us with books’ (quoted from Mary Cowden Clarke, My Long Life: An Autobiographical Sketch [London, 1896], 8), that bounty is moral and intellectual, rather than material” (Chegzoy, 157). 33. Mary Cowden Clarke, The Complete Concordance to Shakespeare: Being a Verbal Index to All the Passages in the Dramatic Works of the Poet (London: Knight, 1845), v, qtd in Marshall, Shakespeare and Victorian Women, 21. 34. Mary Cowden Clarke, My Long Life, 257–58. A further—and related—note: When Cowden Clarke’s sister, Sabilla Novello, prepared a new edition of The Girlhood for publication in 1879, she censored portions of her sister’s original version. 35. Cowden Clarke seems to have taken some inspiration for her critique of Desdemona’s character from Anna Jameson’s earlier one, which Cowden Clarke would have found in Jameson’s Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical (London, 1832)—later re-titled Shakespeare’s Heroines when reissued in 1879, In Jameson we find a similar understanding of the dangers inherent in timidity, identified here as gentleness in excess: “Desdemona displays at times a transient energy, arising from the power of affection, but gentleness gives the prevailing tone to the character—gentleness in its excess—gentleness verging on passiveness—gentleness, which not only cannot resent,--but cannot resist” (Jameson, 243). 36. The next nearly twenty pages of Cowden Clarke’s tale of Desdemona swerves into a lengthy subplot (as it were) of the larger narrative, a subplot

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prompted by Shakespeare’s references in Othello to “Barbary,” the source of the “willow song” that returns and troubles Desdemona late in the play (Othello, ed, E. A. J. Honigmann [Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd, 1997]). For Cowden Clarke, the story of Barbara becomes a significant concern of her tale and offers a fantastic narrative of ill-fated love, obsession, mistaken identity, madness, and murder. It is Cowden Clarke’s gothic story (some decades out of fashion, perhaps) meant to explain the identity and history of a character who appears only be a brief reference in Shakespeare’s play: My mother had a maid called Barbary, She was in love, and he she loved proved mad And did forsake her. She had a song of ‘willow’, An old thing’twas, but it expressed her fortune And she died singing it. (4.3.24–28)

This represents Cowden Clarke’s most elaborate act of dilation in her Desdemona narrative, inventing a complete (and completely elaborate) history in the service of explaining (or, extenuating) a minor reference in her source text. 37. In another quasi-gothic swerve, Cowden Clarke’s Gratiano is arrested and thrown into a dungeon without the slightest explanation, but every expectation of perpetual imprisonment or worse, sudden death: “And am I indeed destined to behold never again the light of the sun,” Gratiano asks himself in his cell, “the face of my fellow-man, the glories of earth, and sky, and sea?” Or, perhaps, he is “to be led forthwith across that fatal bridge, where the breath of doomed wretches has exhaled in anguish so profound, as to have eternized a name of sighs and misery; and then, the dark cell, the midnight strangling, the sack dragged forth through the low portal, the plunge into the funeral waters. And this fate—is it indeed to be mine?” But the disguised Desdemona provides this prisoner an escape (though neither party knows—yet—the identity of the other). We eventually learn that Gratiano’s arrest had been ordered by Brabantio in error (Girlhood, 1: 357–58). 38. In “Shakespeare as the Girl’s Friend,” Cowden Clarke (writing decades after the publication of Girlhood) returns to Desdemona and the critique levied there against Desdemona’s character: Shakespeare has read all gentle-charactered women a lesson on the danger of allowing gentleness to merge into timidity, and timidity into untruthfulness, by the picture he has drawn of Desdemona and of her ill-fated career. It is shown with all the subtlety and force of the dramatist’s art, and with all his wonderful knowledge of womanly nature, how Desdemona’s dread of her father leads her to conceal from him her pref-

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erence for Othello, and to commit the grave error of a clandestine and runaway marriage (“Friend,” 360).

39. Barber references Cowden Clarke’s article, “Shakespeare’s Self as Reflected in his Writings,” Shakespeariana 3 (1886): 147–57, particularly the passage that offers absolute praise of Shakespeare’s “exalted ideal of womanhood” (“Self,” 1155). The same passage adds that Shakespeare had “acutest pain at sight of [woman’s] frailties and failings,” though Shakespeare—always high-minded and moral and upright—never “gave way to … the vulgar general flings at women’s inferiority, and never joined in the too-common attribution to them of senselessness, pettiness, and uselessness” (“Self,” 155). 40. Marshall and Thompson (147) are quoting one of Cowden Clarke’s letters to Robert Balmanno (her “American Enthusiast” and dedicatee of the Girlhood tale of Katharine and Bianca), published posthumously in Letters to an Enthusiast, ed. Anne Upton Nettleton (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1902; rpt. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1904). 41. Cowden Clarke’s letter was written on Shakespeare’s birthday, 23 April 1851. The first pages of the letter address her interest in dedicating the tale of Kate and Bianca to Balmanno—and his reluctance to be thus identified, based (evidently) on Balmanno’s modesty—he is, as he wrote in an earlier letter, “a poor clerk in a public office,” to which Cowden Clarke responds: “A man’s a man for a’ that” the title of a Robert Burns poem, which she then proceeds to quote in part. Later in the same letter Cowden Clarke—now mindful of the date of her letter—confesses, “It was almost sacrilege to quote any other poet than Himself this morning; but dear trulehearted Burns has a right, if any one has, to be quoted and reveled in on Shakespeare’s day” (Letters, 61, 62). 42. Juliet Fleming, “The Ladies’ Shakespeare,” in A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Dympna Callaghan (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 3–20, 16–17. 43. Fleming writes, “[T]o come, however tactfully, to the aid of a parental text—to suggest that it now needs support—is to begin to supplant it; and Cowden Clarke’s work has consequently been read as the type of criticism that holds Shakespeare to be an object whose origin and utility are discontinuous, so that the plays constantly need to be redirected by some power superior to them” (Fleming, 13).

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: The Time of Remediation

Cowden Clarke’s Girlhood was a hugely popular work in the decades after its initial publication in the middle of the nineteenth century. As a testament to its persistence, it has many twentieth-century heirs (including Edith Nesbit and Leon Garfield, to name two major figures in the tradition) and each negotiates in its particular ways the formal and philosophical demands of remediation.1 Among these very many remediations, I have chosen to close this book with a brief consideration of one that is today an admittedly obscure one. But that very obscurity stands, I would argue, as a marker of the broad and deep influence of Cowden Clarke and at the same time the resilience and character of the remedial faculty more generally: Shakespeare and the Heart of a Child, a novel by American author Gertrude Slaughter published in 1922.2 This work both depicts the Shakespearean heart (we might say) of its 13-year old protagonist, Barbara, and offers narrative retellings of many of Shakespeare’s plays as it follows Barbara and her family’s adventures at home and abroad over the span of nearly two years. That the novel’s young protagonist should love Shakespeare is the most natural thing in the world, for as Slaughter writes in the Prologue, “[e]very child loves a good story with a natural passion. Every child is moved by tragedy and humour, and cares not how close they touch each other. And every child feels the power of the mighty line and the inevitable phrase.”3 It is especially interesting for our purposes to see that when Slaughter wishes to describe the revelation that reading Shakespeare’s plays was for © The Author(s) 2019 H. Marchitello, Remediating Shakespeare in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22837-8_7

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Fig. 7.1 Titian, Presentation of the Virgin (1534–1538) (By permission, Accademia Venezia)

Barbara—this “child who dwelt with Shakespeare” and who, moreover, “loved people with an intensity which only Shakespeare could describe”—she turns to the world of art history and one painting, in particular, Titian’s The Presentation of the Virgin (Fig. 7.1): Titian once made a little girl the center of a brilliant scene. As the demure child, with her long, straight braid, mounts the Temple steps in ‘The Presentation of the Virgin,’ the people linger in the streets, lords and ladies shine resplendent under the rich colonnades, the life of the city pauses for a moment in a solemn hush and then goes on as before. But the child is indifferent to it all. Intent upon her task, as with a sort of prescience of what awaits her, she walks with slow, sure step, in all the dignity of innocence, into the Holy of Holies. (Slaughter, vii)

Even as she invokes this important religious painting, however, Slaughter quickly adapts—or remediates—its narrative by inscribing a secularized story on the surface of the religious one Titian depicted. This remediated Presentation tells, then, two stories simultaneously: the story of the Virgin’s transition to the new life of religious training in the Temple and, at the same time, the story of any girl at a critical moment transition that will yield a wholly new world for her:

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And as I look at her, seeing in her not so much the Virgin with her special mission as any child climbing up to his initiation into the mysteries of life, I cannot but think that, when she has entered into the secret of the sanctuary and come forth again, she will be aware of the old egg woman who sat by the stairs unobserved as she entered; she will be concerned with the lives of the lords and ladies moving about; her interests will reach out through the courts and streets that lead away from the church to the busy city. She will come back from the heavenly vision with a new understanding of the world. (Slaughter, vii)

This image of initiation and transformation—overlaid upon Titian’s painting by Slaughter’s remedial gesture—depicts a new setting and engenders a new meaning. In Slaughter’s typological remediation of Titian’s painting, the Virgin becomes a figure for any child and the Temple becomes that child’s encounter with Shakespeare: “In the same way many a child has entered into Shakespeare’s Temple of the human spirit and come forth charged with a knowledge far beyond his present or his future experience” (Slaughter, vii). But because both the sacred and the Shakespearean remain visible in this palimpsestic rendering, the two narratives that each image alone would tell are linked and mutually sustaining. Thus, Shakespeare (“Shakespeare”) is presented to the viewer/reader with quite clear religious significance and power, a power that bequeaths a strange temporality in which the child/reader is now enlightened “far beyond his present and future experience.” This is emblematic of the cult of Shakespeare made visible through the work of remediation. At the same time, this superimposition also functions as an origin story. In Slaughter’s reimaging of Titian, the origin toward which the Presentation is moving is the Shakespeare Temple: that site for the ritualized—perhaps, even, the sacramental —initiation of readers into “a new understanding of the world.” The origin story on offer in Titian and interpellated into Slaughter’s novel—which, after all, lays a certain claim of access to the original —itself manifests the truth of remediation: that every enactment is actually a re-enactment; that every telling is also a retelling. Indeed, Titian’s Presentation can actually be said to exemplify the fundamental nature of remediation. This image, which Slaughter finds so apt a figuration for the Shakespeare Temple, is itself an adaptation of earlier images meant to depict the same scene of the presentation of the Virgin—a story found in the apocryphal Protevangelion of James (a matter to be addressed in more detail below). Titian’s painting of the 1530s looks

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Fig. 7.2 Cima da Conegliano, Presentation of the Virgin at the Temple (ca. 1500) (By permission, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden)

back explicitly to Vittore Carpaccio’s 1504–1508 Presentation of the Virgin Mary at the Temple. And Carpaccio’s painting, for its part, looks back to Cima da Conegliano’s “Presentation” (c. 1500) (Fig. 7.2). The features Slaughter identifies as particularly significant—the “little girl” at the center of the painting and her “demure” nature—are emphasized in Titian’s painting in ways that subtly distinguish his version from both Carpaccio’s and Cima da Conegliano’s: this is clearly a young girl indeed. And this young girl is, of the three depicted in these paintings, the one most actively engaged in encountering her future, as she literally reaches her hand out to the priests who will welcome her and usher her into her lengthy stay in the Temple. All three representations of the Virgin similarly place Mary on the diagonal that serves not only to connect the townspeople to the priests of the Temple, but also to separate the two worlds these distinct groups of people

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inhabit and represent: the world of the city and everyday life, on the one hand, and the world of religious discipline and education undertaken within the walls (confines) of the Temple, on the other. The stairs Mary climbs also trace the trajectory of her displacement from the former into the realm of the latter, the rigors that await her during this particular confinement figured in the long climb that she undertakes bravely and, significantly, alone: Mary has a life, after all, that is wholly unique among the rest of humankind. In fact, if one were to examine this series of paintings from Giotto’s of 1305, in which the Virgin has already arrived at the top of the flight of stairs (with the figure of her mother a few steps behind her, gesturing toward the priests who are already receiving Mary), through Cima da Conelgiano, Carpaccio, and ending with Titian, the increasing isolation of Mary becomes perfectly clear, with Titian’s Virgin standing a great distance from the townspeople and from the priests. At the same time, the world of the city, by the time of Titian’s version, has grown in sheer volume and complexity, with many of the citizens it depicts engaged in matters other than the ascent of the Virgin. Titian seems to suggest by this the increasingly preoccupied urban world from which the Virgin departs but to which she is destined to return to the incalculable benefit of the great diversity of people gathered at her leave-taking.4 In addition to reminding us that storytelling is always story retelling, Titian’s painting of the Virgin’s presentation (and Slaughter’s over-writing of it in her novel) also returns us to another feature of remediation: its proximity to the inauthentic and the fraudulent. The history of the narrative of the presentation of Mary at the temple is grounded in a text that comes to us not from scripture, but rather from the apocryphal Protevangelium of James, a second-century text purporting to tell the story of Mary’s childhood and the birth of Jesus. It is from this text principally that we learn that Joachim and Anne have long suffered from their inability to conceive a child; it is only after many years of mourning—and (like Sarah before conceiving Isaac) late in her life—that Anne conceives a child. This news comes to her through the appearance of an angel who announces that God has heard her prayer and will grant her desire. In response, Anne declares her intention to dedicate the child to the praise of God: “As the Lord God lives, whether I give birth to a boy or a girl, I’ll offer it as a gift to the Lord my God, and it will serve him its whole life.”5 Accordingly, when Mary is three years old, Anne and Joachim fulfill their vow: When the child turned three years of age, Joachim said, ‘Let’s send for the undefiled Hebrew daughters. Let them each take a lamp and light it,

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so the child won’t turn back and have her heart captivated by things outside the Lord’s temple.’ And this is what they did until the time they ascended to the Lord’s temple The priest welcomed her, kissed her, and blessed her: ‘The Lord God has exalted your name among all generations. In you the Lord will disclose his redemption to the people of Israel during the last days. (Hock, 45)

Mary resides in the temple for twelve years and the text remains perfectly silent on those years, resuming the story, as it were, only upon concerns the priests have over her maturation and their fears for the sanctity of the temple threatened by Mary’s impending menstruation: When she tuned twelve … there was a meeting of the priests. ‘Look,’ they said, ‘Mary has turned twelve in the temple of the Lord. What should we do with her so she won’t pollute the sanctuary of the Lord our God?’ (Hock, 47)

As even this briefest of accounts of the Protevangelium suggest, the text is heavily invested in origin stories: the origin of Mary herself (through God’s grace); the origin of Mary’s eventual marriage to an initially reluctant Joseph; and the origin of the history of Jesus as God incarnate, since the text rehearses the Annunciation, the journey to Bethlehem, the appearance of the Magi—as well as several features of the Nativity story not found in the four Gospels.6 At the same time, the appearance of the Titian painting in Slaughter’s novel, deployed as it is to enable the allegory of the Shakespeare Temple, manages to introduce, perhaps obliquely, the specter of the forgery or the fraudulent into the text: the Protevangelium is, after all, apocryphal, which is to say “officially” unauthorized and inauthentic. Slaughter’s reverential elevation of Shakespeare into a quasi-divine status that is celebrated throughout her novel carries within it a counter movement toward the liabilities inherent in such attempts to memorialize. As such, the Shakespeare Temple celebrated in Slaughter’s book emerges for us as yet one more Shakespeare monument, alike in kind to those considered in earlier chapters of this book: Day’s plaster bust of “the Author,” the Garrick monument in Westminster so derided by Charles Lamb, as well as the various editions of Shakespeare’s Works offered by Pope and Theobald, and after them the Bowdlers. It is not necessary to the argument of this discussion to suggest that Gertrude Slaughter has the Protevangelium in mind when she invokes the Titian painting depicting one of that text’s central moments—or that she

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is necessarily contemplating the images that hover over the Titian in a virtually palimpsestic fashion. But it is nevertheless the case that Slaughter’s remediation of Titian’s painting of a religious narrative enacted by substituting any child for Mary and Shakespeare for the Temple—or indeed for God—attempts to achieve the very sort of work that Titian’s painting does to the extent that both seek to offer a founding narrative that is in fact altogether dependent upon a long (perhaps interminable) series of prior—and perhaps future—remediations, rather than a simple or single original. As Slaughter’s remediation of the Presentation demonstrates, the remediation as such introduces and, for that matter, occupies a peculiar temporal space in which original and remediation can be said to exist at the same moment, even though the remediation arrives on the scene only after the original. This presents an important paradox that may actually serve to define the complicated nature of the remediation. Throughout this book I have taken as axiomatic Linda Hutcheon’s assertion that the adaptation is “a derivation that is not derivative—a work that is second without being secondary.” I have sought to expand the parameters of this argument to include the remediation, which shares with the adaptation this defining non-derivative status, even though both adaptations and remediations are, by their very natures, belated: they arise as aesthetic objects only after some interval of time has passed. They follow upon Shakespeare’s chronologically prior utterance. This temporal separateness—and the “secondness” of the remediation in particular—poses certain problems and causes for me a certain anxiety, even as I have tried to hold fast to the belief in the possibility of remediations being second without being secondary. For to lose this belief is to admit to a wholesale devaluing of the remedial urge that has been as constant a response to Shakespeare as it is possible to imagine. Hutcheon, for her part, confronts this worry and resolves it by defining the derivation as “its own palimpsestic thing.”7 As palimpsest, the derivation/adaptation—for us, the remediation—and the “original” are inscribed upon the same temporal plane and thereby exist in something of a temporal paradox that works to erase diachronic time. Critics writing about adaptations and appropriations and remediations have noticed this collapsing of time that obtains in the face of the derivation. Laurie E. Osborne, to offer one recent instance, discusses the “temporal conundrum” in which Mary Cowden Clarke finds herself, noting that “Cowden Clarke’s tales obviously grow from Shakespeare’s creations while narratively and imaginatively preceding them.”8 And in her important discussion of The Girlhood, Juliet Fleming is also concerned to address the matter of the strange

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temporality—what she will call “time’s inversion”—in Cowden Clarke’s prehistories of Shakespeare’s heroines: Beginning both before and after Shakespeare’s plays, and working to motivate something that has already occurred there, they function to propose that (at least in the curious genealogy of literary criticism) the cause of events can come after their happening. The logic of time’s inversion, whereby we see the trace of an object’s vanishing before we see the object itself, has occupied philosophers. … Here it is being used to suggest the proper relation of subsequent writers to Shakespeare, for if his plays represent the vanishing of the (subsequent) girlhood of his heroines, they also represent the vanishing of Cowden Clarke’s work back into his.9

For good cause have these critics, among many others, paused to consider the strange temporalities at play in remediations undertaken in Shakespeare’s name: we see the authors of these remediations themselves give voice to the same uncanny realization. For the Bowdlers, the project of expurgating Shakespeare was inaugurated on behalf of future readers (who were construed as constitutionally vulnerable due to gender and to age) and realized in a vision of a future scene of family reading that served to return us back to Thomas Bowdler’s youthful experience of just such a scene of his father’s superb reading—and silent editing of Shakespeare’s plays in real time. For Mary and Charles Lamb, this strange temporality took the form of an understanding of Shakespeare’s plays as simultaneously both point of origin and the final destination of their young audience’s acts of reading. The circularity of reading here mimics a circularity of imagined time where one both begins and ends in the same place. Mary Cowden Clarke, as well, addresses the strange temporality that quite reasonably she finds on often lavish display in Shakespeare’s works. Cowden Clarke’s last Shakespeare publication (written in collaboration with her husband, though published two years after his death)—the monumental Key To Shakespeare—addresses Shakespeare’s style, very liberally defined. This work is organized (through its nearly 800 pages) as a reference book, with an alphabetical arrangement of topics related to the analysis of style, including “Alliteration,” “Dumb Shows,” “Idioms,” “Musical Terms,” “Pleonasms,” “Soliloquies,” and even “Weights and Measures.” Among the scores of entries, the longest and most detailed (running to nearly 200 pages) attempts to understand the strangeness of Shakespearean temporality and does so under the rubric of Shakespeare’s

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“Dramatic Time.” Cowden Clarke’s single focus in this long dissertation on Dramatic Time is the conspicuous ways in which Shakespeare is able—even in full awareness of the classical demands of the unity of time and his deliberate yet controlled violations of them—to create two times schemes in a single play. It is this “original and admirable system of Dramatic Time,” she writes, that allows this temporal magic: This system is so ingenious in itself, and is put into operation with so masterly a skill, that it enables the reader or spectator to see a long course of time, or a limited space of time, or even a simultaneous progress of protracted time and current time both together, without a violation of probability or injury to naturalness of effect.10

In support of this pronouncement, Cowden Clarke offers dozens of instances in the plays, together with commentary on them. Among the more striking of these commentaries is one offered in relation to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which she states that “the poet casts his own magic spell over us, as we accept the four days or one night as equally possible, just as he wills” (Key, 124). And, lest anyone suspect that Shakespeare’s own strange temporalities indicated authorial inattention or incompetence (one of those rare moments when the poet nodded), Cowden Clarke points to “the supreme tragedy of Othello” (Key, 212) and vigorously works to disabuse such a reader of such an error: So systematically is Long Time implied, while Short Time is preserved, that it is impossible not to believe in this having been the author’s thorough intention and artistic plan. (Key, 218)

Cowden Clarke’s celebration of Shakespeare’s system of magical time culminates in an explicit identification of this system as the cause of Shakespeare’s transcendence. “The great secret of Shakespeare’s dominion in Dramatic Art,” she writes in her treatment of Cymbeline, “is his unity of impression; he invariably produces unity of impression, however he may subject the respective unities of time and place to his own ordinances” (Key, 233). The mention of “ordinances” here carries, I think, a double significance that can be brought to bear on the matter of strange temporality. On the one hand, it certainly means something like Shakespeare’s own rules of art (as distinct from those attributed to Aristotle, for example). On the other hand, and given Cowden Clarke’s spiritual devotion to Shakespeare, it is reasonable to understand these ordinances as religious rites. As such, it can

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be no small wonder that for her Shakespeare exercises “dominion” over the dramatic arts—and perhaps life, too, at least a life as lived by Cowden Clarke as Shakespeare’s acolyte (even if she will chafe at certain constraints imposed by both Shakespeare and her own belated arrival as a writer who takes up her pen in Shakespeare’s name). In this regard, the act of writing the Shakespeare remediation stands as a gesture, as it were, that works to collapse the distinctness of Shakespeare’s work and the remediation enacted in its image. Remediation becomes palimpsest becomes a devotional icon. In this progression that is also, in a sense, a regression, the relatedness of Shakespeare’s original and the remediation is articulated along the trajectory of what might be considered palimpsestic time, time collapsed onto itself such that both texts exist without a logical or necessary or temporal priority. The Shakespeare remediation shares a strange temporality analogous to Cowden Clarke’s theorization of Shakespearean “dramatic time” and helps to explain the temporal paradox by which Slaughter’s Shakespearean child will emerge from the Shakespeare Temple “charged with a knowledge far beyond his present or future experience.” This super-charge of knowledge—this projected state of spiritual and perhaps divine knowingness—cannot exist at any point in time; it can exist only outside of time. It is for this reason I want to say that the time of remediations of Shakespeare is a sacramental time.11 The remediation as a palimpsestic thing participates in the construction of its own quasi-divine strange temporality. Looking back, as it must, to some prior work, it simultaneously moves relentlessly forward into a future that—if it is to succeed as art—finds its anticipated realization in a meeting with the past in an always pending act of reading.

Notes 1. Edith Nesbit, Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1907); Leon Garfield, Shakespeare Stories (London: Gollancz, 1985). The list of authors writing Shakespeare remediations, in various forms and genres, is vast and ranges from contemporary picture books by Marcia Williams and Bruce Coville to the ongoing series of novels adapted from Shakespeare published in the Chatto and Windus/Hogarth series (featuring novelists such as Jeanette Winterston, Tracy Chevalier, Anne Tyler, Edward St. Aubyn, Howard Jacobson, and Margaret Atwood, among others). 2. Gertrude Slaughter was born in 1870 in Cambridge, Ohio, the daughter of Elizabeth Hill Taylor and Joseph Danner Taylor, an Ohio congressman. Slaughter graduated from Bryn Mawr College (1893) and together with her husband, Moses Slaughter (a classicist and later head of the

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Department of Ancient Classics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison)—and in this regard like the family in Shakespeare and the Heart of a Child—the Slaughters traveled extensively in Europe. These experiences are reflected in her several publications, including Two Children in Old Paris (Macmillan, 1918), Heirs of Venice (Yale, 1927), Calabria, the First Italy (University of Wisconsin Press, 1939), and two biographical studies, The Amazing Frederic (Macmillan, 1937) and Saladin, 1138–1193 (Exposition Press, 1955). Also like Cowden Clarke, Slaughter would turn to autobiography in her old age, publishing Only the Past Is Ours: The Life Story of Gertrude Slaughter (Exposition Press) in 1963, the year of her death. The Gertrude Slaughter Fellowship was established at Bryn Mawr by her bequest in 1964 and is awarded to a graduating woman for academic excellence and to support one year’s study either within the U.S. or internationally. Gertrude Slaughter, Shakespeare and the Heart of a Child (New York: Macmillan, 1922), vi. As a Christian narrative The Presentation of the Virgin performs a number of important functions, not the least of which is its work in establishing another point-of-origin story: not only does it offer a glimpse of the childhood of Mary—which is not available in the New Testament—but it also establishes typologically the precedent for the later presentation of Christ at the Temple and the still later Christ casting out the moneylenders from the Temple (the subjects of countless religious paintings, including works by these same painters), as well as preparing the way for the young Jesus’s visits to the Temple to instruct (or, to confound) the priests. The Infancy Gospel of James and Thomas, ed. Ronald F. Hock (Santa Rosa: Polebridge Press, 1995), 37. Among these unique elements, the Protoevangelium provides a striking appearance by Salome, who has been told of the virgin birth but will not believe Mary a virgin unless she submit her to a physical examination: The midwife entered and said, ‘Mary, position yourself for an examination. You are facing a serious test.’ And so Mary, when she heard these instructions, positioned herself, and Salome inserted her finger into Mary. And then Salome cried aloud and said, ‘I’ll be damned because of my transgression and my disbelief; I have put the living God on trial. Look! My hand is disappearing! It is being consumed by flames!’ Then Salome fell on her knees in the presence of the Lord, with these words: ‘God of my ancestors, remember me because I am a descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Do not make an example of me for the people of Israel, but give me a place among the poor again. You yourself

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know, Lord, that I’ve been healing people in your name and have been receiving my payment from you.’ And suddenly a messenger of the Lord appeared, saying to her, ‘Salome, Salome, the Lord of all has heard your prayer. ‘Hold out your hand to the child and pick him up, and then you’ll have salvation and joy.’ (Hock, 69)

7. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 9. 8. Laurie E. Osborne, “From Mary Cowden Clarke to Contemporary Young Adult Novels: (Re)constructing Gender and Sexuality in Adaptations of As You Like It and Twelfth Night,” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 9.2 (October 2015), n.p. 9. Juliet Fleming, “The Ladies’ Shakespeare,” in A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Dympna Callaghan (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 3–20, 14. 10. Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, The Shakespeare Key: Unlocking the Treasures of His Style, Elucidating the Peculiarities of His Construction, and Displaying the Beauties of His Expression; Forming a Companion to ‘The Complete Concordance to Shakespeare’ (London, 1879), 107. 11. The attempt to understand the nature of time within an explicitly Christian context receives one of its most important and enduring and influential articulations in St. Augustine’s Confessions. Considering the three times tradition has identified—past, present, and future—Augustine confronts what emerges as the effective non-existence of all three. “One hour is itself constituted of fugitive moments. Whatever part of it has flown away is past. What remains to it is future” (Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991], 232). And while this seems to grant the possibility of the present as indeed present, even this hope proves illusory. Augustine continues: If we can think of some bit of time which cannot be divided into even the smallest instantaneous moments, what alone is what we can call ‘present.’ And this time flies so quickly from future into past that it is an interval with no duration. If it has duration, it is divisible into past and future. But the present occupies no space. (232)

To apprehend this notion of time occupying no space is, for Augustine, to begin to approximate an understanding of time as perceived by God. Or, it is to begin to understand the notion of eternity as pure duration.

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Index

A absence(s), 7, 11, 12, 16, 34 adaptation, 11–19, 27, 28, 32, 33, 37, 38, 41, 44, 51, 55, 56, 59, 67, 76, 78, 108, 110, 113, 115, 130–132, 138, 139, 142, 147, 149, 150, 152, 157–160, 168, 183, 192, 203, 207 adaptive faculty, 15, 16 Addison, Joseph, 65 Ainger, Alfred, 102, 127 Arden of Faversham, 54 Aristotle, 68, 69, 209 Arts-Manufacture, 168, 169, 173 Auerbach, Nina, 166, 194 authenticity, 2, 3, 11, 31, 38, 39, 42, 43, 46, 51, 58, 59, 143, 144 authority, 132, 143, 148, 157 authorship, 32, 36, 40, 44, 53, 56, 60

Barber, Sarah, 166, 167, 184, 185, 191, 194, 200 Bate, Jonathan, 77, 89, 149, 150, 161 Beaumont, Franics, 35, 60 Belvedere Apollo, 79, 80 Benjamin, Walter, 15, 144, 160 Bergeron, David, 42, 60 Betterton, Thomas, 39, 55 Black, James, 131, 132, 158, 159 Bolter, David, 18 Boteler, Thomas, 133 Bowdler, Henrietta and Thomas, 10, 21, 65–68, 72, 75–90, 157, 206, 208 Family Shakespeare, 20 Bowdler, Thomas, 54, 55, 208 British Critic, 8–11, 20, 22, 26, 54, 64 Brown, Sarah Annes, 165, 193 Byler, Lauren, 167, 168, 194, 195

B Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 102, 103

C Cardenio, 12, 19, 24, 27, 33–45, 49, 50, 56, 58–60, 62, 64

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 H. Marchitello, Remediating Shakespeare in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22837-8

225

226

INDEX

Carpaccio, Vittore, 204, 205 Cavell, Stanley, 144, 161 Cervantes, Miguel de, 12, 33, 34, 56, 59 Don Quixote of La Mancha, 12, 19 Chartier, Roger, 12, 19, 27, 33, 34, 41, 56, 71, 89 Christie, Alexander, 169, 171, 172, 174 Cibber, Colley, 98 Clarke, Mary Cowden, 17–19, 22, 156, 158, 163–171, 181–201, 207–212 “Shakespeare as the Girl’s Friend”, 163 Key To Shakespeare, 208, 209, 212 The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines , 22, 158, 163–171, 181–195, 198–201, 207 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 100, 102, 150, 161 Collier, John Payne, 171, 196 Conegliano, Cima da, 204 counterfeit, 11, 12, 21, 31, 38, 45, 47, 94, 96, 98, 101, 124 Critical Review, 100 Cushman, Charlotte, 166, 194 D Darwin, Charles, 23, 169, 180 Davenant, William, 40 Dawkins, Richard, 15 Day, W.C., 1, 31–34, 45, 55, 206 Behind the Footlights , 6 deferral, 117, 121, 122 deletion, 21, 22, 117, 120–122, 137, 144, 152 Derrida, Jacques, 36, 56 design, 18, 22, 164, 168–171, 173–181, 184, 186, 189, 190, 192, 197 Dickens, Charles, 171, 195, 196

dilation, 22, 117, 119, 121, 122, 137, 165, 171, 184, 199 Dobson, Michael, 32, 55 Dodington, George, 38 Dowden, Edward, 53 Downes, John, 39, 58 Dryden, John, 142

E editorship, 37, 53 Edward III , 54 encryption, 35, 36, 49

F Fleming, Juliet, 192, 200, 207 Fletcher, John, 12, 24, 32, 33, 35, 37, 40–42, 52, 56, 58, 59, 64 forgery, 136, 206 Frazier, Harriet C., 43, 59 Freehafer, John, 50, 58 Freud, Sigmund, 36

G Garfield, Leon, 201, 210 Garrick, David, 21, 76, 89, 91–94, 96, 98, 122, 123, 206 “Ode Upon Dedicating a Building”, 76, 89 Memorial in Westminster Abbey, 21 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 132, 159 ghost Shakespeare as, 32–37, 43–49, 52, 55–57, 61 Gildon, Charles, 132 Giotto, 205 Godwin, William, 105 Godwin, William and Mary, 103 Juvenile Library, 103, 105, 116 Goldberg, Jonathan, 35, 56 Graham, Walter, 49

INDEX

Greg, W.W., 40, 58 Grusin, Richard, 18 H haunting, 34, 36, 42, 44 Herostratus, 79, 85 Higginbotham, Jennifer, 168, 195 Hunt, Leigh, 91, 100, 171, 195 Hunt, Leigh, 126 Hutcheon, Linda, 13, 27, 207, 212 I imitation(s), 41, 51, 71–75, 94, 100, 127, 183 immediacy, 7, 9–11, 18 Ireland, William Henry, 3, 26, 99 Vortigern and Rowena, 3, 26, 99 J Jameson, Anna, 166, 194, 198 Jeffrey, Francis, 83 Jeffrey, Lord, 83 Johnson, Samuel, 10, 68, 89, 90, 132, 159 K Kemble, Frances Anne, 166 Kemble, John Philip, 95, 99 Knight, Charles, 171, 198 Knowles, Richard, 37 Kukowski, Stephan, 41, 58 L Lamb, Charles, 17, 18, 21, 22, 91, 102, 103, 105, 107, 108, 110, 113, 121, 122, 125–131, 139, 158–161, 206 and anti-theatricalism, 21, 87, 94, 96, 98, 125, 141

227

and Falstaff’s Letters , 21, 94, 99–101, 126 and illustrations, 107 “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare”, 91, 139–141, 159 Lamb, Charles and Mary, 55, 87, 90, 139, 160, 164, 208 Mrs. Leicester’s School , 105 Poetry for Children, Entirely Original , 105 Tales from Shakespeare, 87, 94, 98, 102–112, 114–122, 124, 125, 128–130, 142, 145, 156, 157, 160, 163 legitimacy, 143 Leochares, 80 Levinson, Paul, 17 limitations, 14 M Malone, Edmond, 26, 53, 99 Manning, Thomas, 100, 103 Marsden, Jean I., 104, 105, 122, 128, 129 Marshall, Gail, 166, 167, 185, 191, 193, 194, 198, 200 mediation, 7, 8, 10, 13, 18 memory, 6, 26, 33, 36, 37, 42, 45–47, 51, 57, 60 Milton, John L’Allegro, 78, 89 Montagu, Elizabeth, 67, 68, 75, 88 Monthly Review, 100 monument, 31–37, 42, 43, 45, 46, 48, 49, 51–53, 56, 57, 91, 93, 94, 110, 123, 134 monumentalization, 20, 34, 35, 37, 42, 46, 49, 54 More, Hannah, 104, 129 morphology, 23, 168, 169, 178–180, 197 Moseley, Humphrey, 35

228

INDEX

Moxon, Edward, 99

N Nesbit, Edith, 201, 210

O Orgel, Stephen, 38 original(s), 165, 186, 203, 207, 209, 210 originality, 34, 45 Osborne, Laurie E., 207, 212

P palimpsest, 14 Pope, Alexander, 40, 68–71, 74, 76, 81, 86, 89, 206 Pratt, Samuel Jackson, 21, 93 prequel, 165–168, 170, 171, 182, 194, 195 presence, 6, 7, 13, 14, 18, 32, 35–37, 41, 44, 51, 59, 64 Protevangelion of James , 203

Q quotation, 144, 158

R Raphael, 79 redaction, 20, 67, 68, 78, 80–82, 84 remediation, 11, 17, 18, 21–23, 31, 33, 37, 46, 47, 59, 67, 69, 76, 78, 80, 87, 93, 101, 107, 108, 110–112, 116–118, 120, 121, 136, 138, 139, 144, 149, 152, 156–158, 160, 167, 168, 171, 191, 201, 203, 205, 207, 210 and content, 115 and execution, 117

and form, 112 as belated, 207, 210 as palimpsest, 207, 210 Richards, Jennifer, 37 Romano, Giulio, 80, 89 Rowe, Nicholas, 50, 62, 132 S Seary, Peter, 50, 62 Shadwell, Thomas, 141, 142 Shakespeare, William, 2, 4, 6–14, 16–24, 26–28, 31–42, 44, 45, 49–79, 81–91, 93–100, 102–110, 114–131, 159, 163–168, 170, 171, 181–186, 189–195, 197–203, 206–212 All’s Well That Ends Well , 116 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 14, 116, 183, 209 Antony and Cleopatra, 191 Coriolanus , 142 Cymbeline, 209 Hamlet , 36, 39, 43–49, 52, 55, 60, 61, 94–96, 105, 107–114, 116, 123, 128–130 Henry IV , 101 Henry V , 84, 95 Julius Caesar, 8 King Lear, 17, 19, 21, 22, 97, 98, 122, 126, 128 Love’s Labour’s Won, 35, 56 Macbeth, 6, 26, 95, 103, 105, 116, 123, 124, 128, 130 Othello, 19, 94, 103, 105, 123, 128, 170–172, 185, 186, 189, 190, 199, 200, 209 Pericles , 54, 64, 65 Richard III , 97 Sonnets , 117 The Tragedie of King Lear, 139 The Two Noble Kinsmen, 54, 60, 64 The Winter’s Tale, 80, 89

INDEX

True Chronicle History of the life and death of King Lear and his three Daughters, With the unfortunate life of Edgar, sonne and heire to the Earle of Gloster, and his sullen and assumed humor of Tom of Bedlam, 139 Works , 34, 36, 37, 49–52, 62, 63 and absence, 7 and character, 95–98, 100, 101, 112, 113, 116, 129, 130, 164 and character criticism, 165, 168 and design, 66, 71 and genius, 67, 69, 75, 88, 89 and monuments, 6, 7, 11, 20, 21, 76, 77, 206 and Nature, 74, 75, 77, 78 and originality, 11, 68, 74, 78, 86 and young readers, 145, 146, 154, 156–158, 164–166, 168, 192 as original, 69, 73, 74, 77, 78, 80, 81, 85, 86 First Folio, 10, 27, 37, 56, 57 for young readers, 16, 19, 22, 23, 66 Sonnet 122, 36 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 185, 195 Sheridan, Richard, 99 Siddons, Sarah, 95 Sidney, Philip, 138, 145 Slaughter, Gertrude, 201–207, 210, 211 Shakespeare and the Heart of a Child, 201, 211 Southey, Robert, 99, 126 Spenser, Edmund, 132

T Tate, Nahum, 17, 98, 126, 131–137, 139–142, 146–148, 153, 154, 158–160 The History of King Lear, 131, 158

229

Taussig, Michael, 15, 28 teleology, 23, 168, 169, 178–180, 197 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 182, 183, 197 The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir and his Three Daughters , 22, 132 Theobald, Lewis, 2, 12, 19, 20, 24–26, 31–35, 37–45, 49–53, 55–60, 62–64, 68, 89, 142, 159, 206 “The Cave of Poverty, a Poem”, 41 Double Falsehood, 2–4, 12, 19, 20, 24–26, 31–45, 49–51, 56–60, 62 Shakespeare Restor’d, 44 Works of Shakespeare, 49 Thompson, Ann, 166, 191, 194 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), 202–207 Tomlinson, Charles, 169, 173, 174, 196, 197 Illustrations of Useful Arts, Manufactures, and Trades , 173, 196 Objects in Art-Manufacture, 173, 196 Tonson, Jacob, 50, 54, 62 Trimmer, Sarah, 102 V Voltaire, 66 W Warburton, William, 49 Watt, James, 177 White, James (Jem), 21, 94 Wilson, Charles Heath, 171 Wilson, George, 169, 173–181, 197 The Character of God, as Inferred from the Study of Human Anatomy, 169 Wilson, Richard, 42, 60 Wordsworth, William, 105–107, 150