30 Great Myths about Shakespeare by Laurie Maguire, Emma Smith Page A
Authors: Laurie Maguire, Emma Smith
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the Folio of 1623).
The myth that Shakespeare did not revise comes partly from Heminge and Condell's praise of his manuscripts in their epistle “To the Great Variety of Readers” at the front of the First Folio in 1623: “His mind and hand went together, and what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.” 7 Shakespeare's contribution to Sir Thomas More bears this out: his lines are fluent and unblotted. But unblotted papers do not mean unrevised papers (as the More example shows where Shakespeare corrected himself in the process of writing).
Grace Ioppolo has shown how frequent revision was among Elizabethan playwrights. Ernst Honigmann has analyzed revisions in manuscript poems by a large number of post-Renaissance writers. Vladimir Nabokov said that his pencils outlasted their erasers. Ernest Hemingway rewrote the end of Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times. (“What was it that had stopped you?” an interviewer asked him. “Getting the words right,” replied Hemingway. 8 ) It is rare to find authors who do not revise. Good writers are re-writers.
Notes
1 W.W. Greg, The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942), p. xix.
2 The quarto reads “flectkted,” a non-existent word that is clearly a misprint for “fleckled.”
3 Lois Potter, The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), p. 283.
4 Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, with John Jowett and William Montgomery, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 18.
5 Greg, The Editorial Problem , pp. 111–12.
6 A.E. Housman, “The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism,” in The Classical Papers of A. E. Housman , vol. 3, ed. J. Diggle and F.R.D. Goodyear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 1058–69 (p. 1064).
7 Complete Works: The RSC Shakespeare , ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007), “Preliminary Pages of the First Folio,” ll. 83–5.
8 Grace Ioppolo, Revising Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); E.A.J. Honigmann, The Stability of Shakespeare's Text (London: Edward Arnold, 1965); interview with Vladimir Nabokov (1962) at: http://lib.ru/NABOKOW/Inter01.txt (accessed 28 September 2011); Ernest Hemingway, “The Art of Fiction,” interview in The Paris Review , 21 (1956): http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4825/the-art-of-fiction-no-21-ernest-hemingway (accessed 12 July 2012).
Myth 27
Yorick's skull was real
In Act 5 of Hamlet the Prince encounters a gravedigger preparing a new grave. The grave has had previous occupants: as he digs, the gravedigger throws up skulls of the already-buried. This is not an unusual occurrence. The graves of commoners were unmarked (a practice unchanged until the early seventeenth century) and so the chances of reuse were high; and corpses were buried in sheets, not coffins, so if the grave was redug the sexton's spade would unearth bones rather than wood. Dislodged remains were removed to the charnel house—a bone house or ossuary within church grounds and therefore a consecrated space. (After death, a consecrated space was more important than personal space.)
Shakespeare's gravedigger identifies one of the skulls as that of the court jester, Yorick: “a mad rogue—'a poured a flagon of Rhenish on my head once!” (5.1.174–5). Hamlet remembers him as “a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy” and recalls childhood play with the jester: “he hath borne me on his back a thousand times” (5.1.181–2). (The Victorian artist Philip Calderon depicts this piggy-back riding in his painting The Young Lord Hamlet (1868), and Kenneth Branagh's 1996 film inserts flashbacks of Yorick [comedian Ken Dodd] entertaining the court.) Although Shakespeare does not provide a stage direction instructing Hamlet to pick up the skull, all modern editions insert one: Takes the
The myth that Shakespeare did not revise comes partly from Heminge and Condell's praise of his manuscripts in their epistle “To the Great Variety of Readers” at the front of the First Folio in 1623: “His mind and hand went together, and what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.” 7 Shakespeare's contribution to Sir Thomas More bears this out: his lines are fluent and unblotted. But unblotted papers do not mean unrevised papers (as the More example shows where Shakespeare corrected himself in the process of writing).
Grace Ioppolo has shown how frequent revision was among Elizabethan playwrights. Ernst Honigmann has analyzed revisions in manuscript poems by a large number of post-Renaissance writers. Vladimir Nabokov said that his pencils outlasted their erasers. Ernest Hemingway rewrote the end of Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times. (“What was it that had stopped you?” an interviewer asked him. “Getting the words right,” replied Hemingway. 8 ) It is rare to find authors who do not revise. Good writers are re-writers.
Notes
1 W.W. Greg, The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942), p. xix.
2 The quarto reads “flectkted,” a non-existent word that is clearly a misprint for “fleckled.”
3 Lois Potter, The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), p. 283.
4 Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, with John Jowett and William Montgomery, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 18.
5 Greg, The Editorial Problem , pp. 111–12.
6 A.E. Housman, “The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism,” in The Classical Papers of A. E. Housman , vol. 3, ed. J. Diggle and F.R.D. Goodyear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 1058–69 (p. 1064).
7 Complete Works: The RSC Shakespeare , ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007), “Preliminary Pages of the First Folio,” ll. 83–5.
8 Grace Ioppolo, Revising Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); E.A.J. Honigmann, The Stability of Shakespeare's Text (London: Edward Arnold, 1965); interview with Vladimir Nabokov (1962) at: http://lib.ru/NABOKOW/Inter01.txt (accessed 28 September 2011); Ernest Hemingway, “The Art of Fiction,” interview in The Paris Review , 21 (1956): http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4825/the-art-of-fiction-no-21-ernest-hemingway (accessed 12 July 2012).
Myth 27
Yorick's skull was real
In Act 5 of Hamlet the Prince encounters a gravedigger preparing a new grave. The grave has had previous occupants: as he digs, the gravedigger throws up skulls of the already-buried. This is not an unusual occurrence. The graves of commoners were unmarked (a practice unchanged until the early seventeenth century) and so the chances of reuse were high; and corpses were buried in sheets, not coffins, so if the grave was redug the sexton's spade would unearth bones rather than wood. Dislodged remains were removed to the charnel house—a bone house or ossuary within church grounds and therefore a consecrated space. (After death, a consecrated space was more important than personal space.)
Shakespeare's gravedigger identifies one of the skulls as that of the court jester, Yorick: “a mad rogue—'a poured a flagon of Rhenish on my head once!” (5.1.174–5). Hamlet remembers him as “a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy” and recalls childhood play with the jester: “he hath borne me on his back a thousand times” (5.1.181–2). (The Victorian artist Philip Calderon depicts this piggy-back riding in his painting The Young Lord Hamlet (1868), and Kenneth Branagh's 1996 film inserts flashbacks of Yorick [comedian Ken Dodd] entertaining the court.) Although Shakespeare does not provide a stage direction instructing Hamlet to pick up the skull, all modern editions insert one: Takes the
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