The Bard Business
BEVINGTON, DAVID
The Bard Business_ The Annotated Shakespeare Edited by A. L. Rowse Clarkson N. Potter. 2,432pp. (three volumes) $60.00. Reviewed by David Bevington Professor of English, University of...
...Try reading parallel passages of almost any part of Richard III in TheAnnotatedShakespeare'and in a reputable edition, and see how numerous are the alterations in wording...
...Better it were called The Unannotated Shakespeare...
...O, come in, equivocator...
...Rowse, in his note on "The Text of the Play" in Volume III, appears to have missed this point entirely...
...Or it will inform you that "roast your goose" means "heat your tailor's smoothing iron...
...A. L. Rowse's commentary is just plain inadequate...
...As a result, one finds many purely speculative staging arrangements that are almost surely wrong...
...What one is left to admire are the illustrations and the extraordinary hype being employed to market The Annotated Shakespeare...
...Of a comic passage in Measure for Measure, for example, Rowse declares: "With what gusto Shakespeare wrote that passage...
...To this extent his work appeals, one fears, to those nominally educated but culturally insecure members of the professional class who flirt with the idea that Shakespeare didn't write his own plays at all...
...Come in, tailor, here you may roast your goose...
...The Globe text also alters stage directions at will without informing the reader where it has done so...
...Knock...
...Questions concerning the dating of the plays do not trouble Rowse either...
...In the case of The Annotated Alice, a work I much admire, a facsimile of the original edition makes perfect sense...
...Knock, knock, knock...
...Even when Rowse lets himself go occasionally on long notes, he is apt to be chasing a pet theory about contemporary allusions in Shakespeare...
...that is, he has been hoarding in anticipation of a bad harvest which fails to materialize, leaving him with disastrously low prices...
...Rowse's introduction to the play mentions the trial of Henry Garnet, the Jesuit, but does not indicate its relevance to the Porter's lines...
...A text like the Riverside provides much more detailed interpretation, and in a less cumbersome package...
...Unfortunately, Hamlet, Richard III, Othello, and other major plays are seriously marred by the past editorial practice of allowing the editors to choose readings from various early texts according to taste...
...Discrepancies are evident in thousands upon thousands of lines...
...He had recovered his spirits...
...It implies that, unlike existing Shakespeare editions, this one offers explanations or critical interpretations of difficult phrases, obscure references, and the like...
...The 19th-century Globe Shakespeare is, however, not an original...
...Faith, here's an English tailor come hither for stealing out of a French hose...
...Perhaps the most regrettable aspect of this edition, and of Rowse's later work generally, is the split it drives between the academic and nonacademic worlds...
...Unhappily, as adulatory reviews in Time and the Wall Street Journal suggest, the campaign is succeeding at least in part...
...Half of each page in this sumptuous, heavy three-volume set is generally devoted to the notes and to illustrations, and half contains the text...
...Consider the Porter scene in Macbeth (II,hi), in which a drunken porter opens the door of Macbeth's castle to Macduff and Lennox immediately after the murder of King Duncan but before that murder has become known...
...The illustrations are fine...
...As for A Midsummer Night's Dream, it was written or adapted in 1594 "for a wedding celebration" (a popular but wholly unproven notion...
...In so doing, he frequently reduces Shakespeare to the status of reporter, one who could scarcely create a character without fashioning it on some existing figure...
...Yet even a cursory glance reveals that, despite the lavish use of pictures, the half-pages devoted to commentary and illustration contain a great deal of blank space...
...The choice also shows his ignorance of their textual studies over the last 100 years...
...For example, he finds it necessary to gloss a reference to shipwrecks and storms in Macbeth (I.ii.26) with an account of a dangerous voyage undertaken by King James of Scotland in 1589—some 17 years (and innumerable shipwrecks) before the play was written...
...Similar instances of inadequate glossing by Rowse could by multiplied literally thousands of times...
...This is the kind of "biographical fallacy" usually associated with Edward Dowden and other critics of the later 19th century...
...Again, at the end of IV.iv in the same play, the Globe indicates a general exeunt instead of leaving Juliet on stage in her bed, asleep...
...Examples of this sort are too numerous to list...
...A poet like Shakespeare deserves to have his words rendered as accurately as possible...
...On the accompanying half-page, Rowse glosses only one word: "old" in the second line ("sufficient...
...Contempt and ignorance often go together...
...Modern editors generally agree on the dangers of rewriting Shakespeare to "improve" him...
...The Globe text has the double disadvantage, too, of being overpunctuated in the 19th-century style, and of using English spellings—"honour," "judgement" and "gaol" (jail...
...Who's there, in th' other devil's name...
...Then there is the text itself...
...In fact, not only are there many excellently annotated Shakespeares available today, such as The Riverside Shakespeare or The Pelican Shakespeare, but compared to them the new entry is a poor job indeed...
...The Rowse reprints by facsimile the so-called Globe edition, prepared in England roughly a century ago...
...The editing of Shakespeare has made much progress in the last century...
...Rowse has been appearing on talk shows as though his edition were a major event of the literary season...
...A new and superior original text of Titus Andronicus has come to light during this period...
...The play, after all, contains an aging monarch, and Queen Elizabeth was very old...
...All's Well That Ends Well, especially difficult to pinpoint because contemporary references to it are lacking, is placed matter-of-factly in 1603 so that one can study it in relation to the death of Queen Elizabeth and the accession of King James...
...His latest effort will not disappoint those who thrive on such evanescent controversy...
...A catchy idea, no...
...Rowse's introductions are breezy, readable, at times informative, and at times maddeningly urbane in the assertion of absolute certainty where none exists...
...He thrives on antipathy stirred up by anti-academism, and takes evident pleasure in exacerbating it...
...He baits literary scholars and feeds on their disapprobation...
...Does Michael Cassio say, in the same play (ll.iii.80), "Is your Englishman so expert in his drinking," or " Is your Englishman so exquisite in his drinking...
...Come in time...
...He has becomes notorious for this in recent years, with his certified discovery of the Dark Lady of the Sonnets and his heaping of scorn on any who doubt his identification of the Rival Poet in the Sonnets, among other claims...
...Reviewed by David Bevington Professor of English, University of Chicago Here, from the folks who brought you The Annotated Mother Goose, The Annotated Alice, and so on, is something called The Annotated Shakespeare...
...Or they emended freely to iron out the meter or to "make sense" of a difficult passage or to restore grammatical agreement between a subject and its verb...
...If a man were porter of Hell Gate, he should have old turning the key...
...Why the Globe...
...Here's a farmer, that hang'd himself on th' expectation of plenty...
...Rowse thus professes to understand the mood of our Master Poet as he worked his way from the problem plays and tragedies toward the romances...
...Knock, Knock...
...In Romeo and Juliet, at the end of Il.i, when Romeo is about to see Juliet at her window, the Globe direction empties the stage instead of leaving Romeo in view, as he is in the original texts...
...Certitude about these matters enables Rowse to move comfortably through Shakespeare's spiritual biography, asserting what the poet knew or felt at any given moment...
...Knock...
...The "Annotated" series customarily gives us facsimile reprints...
...Knock, knock, knock...
...Indications of where the action takes place, inserted at the beginnings of scenes, are often in error as well...
...Pictures of actors in favorite roles alternate with others from the 18th and 19th centuries showing how those ages interpreted and imagined the Weird Sisters or Ophelia drowning herself or King Lear in the storm on the heath...
...I know of no teacher who is not dismayed by his three volumes, and by his hyperbolic claims of certainty in identifying the dramatis personae of the Sonnets...
...Does lago say "Arise, black vengeance, from thy hollow cell" (Othello, Ill.iii.447), or does he say "Arise, black vengeance, from the hollow hell...
...They give us refreshing glimpses of theatrical history and the history of taste in Shakespeare criticism...
...The publishing company, Potter, mails out brochures with glossy photographs that resemble prospectuses for new stock issues...
...It is inconsistent in its rendition of such variably spelled words as account-accompt, swoon-swound-sound, burden-burthen, wrack-wreck, bankrupt-bank-rout...
...In its latest incarnation, though, the title is seriously misleading...
...Or it will tell you what an equivocator is, and what equivocating meant to Jacobean England...
...Rowse gives us a portrait of Shakespeare in Berowne of Love's Labour's Lost, and identifies a contemporary model for Don Armado in the same play...
...Conversely, in "trade" book publishing, where a text like The Riverside Shakespeare is apparently almost unknown to reviewers and readers alike, Rowse bids fair to become a coffee-table success...
...Rowse's glossing contents itself with explaining a few words or short phrases, ignoring many larger phrases or references thai are often difficult to follow...
...Faith, here's an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven...
...Editors often inserted into the Folio text a word or phrase from the quarto because it sounded more "Shakespearean," or because it scanned better...
...the Globe is based on the wrong early edition...
...Well, perhaps you weren't planning to read Titus Andro-nicus anyway...
...It is an old critical version of Shakespeare that for many reasons ought to be retired from public view...
...Knock...
...Macbeth comes immediately after King Lear," we are told, "and there is no problem whatever about its date...
...The following is a part of the Porter's first speech: "Here's a knocking indeed...
...In his choice of the Globe text, A. L. Rowse shows his contempt for the literary scholars of recent generations who have sought to improve our understanding of Shakespeare...
...Any reputable recent annotated Shakespeare will explain to you the paradox of a farmer hanging himself "on th' expectation of plenty...
...Have napkins enow about you, here you'll sweat for't...
...Who's there, i' th' name of Belzebub...
Vol. 61 • December 1978 • No. 24
