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Article Excerpt
--Who's that?
--No one. The author.
--Shakespeare in Love
AUTHORSHIP MATTERS. It is not merely that we want to know who has written what we read (think of the recent excitement over the outing of Laura Albert as "J. T. LeRoy") or sometimes who has written what we don't read (as is the case with much of the interest in the Shakespeare authorship question), but, more abstractly, if also more consequentially, the concept of authorship is tightly tied to the urgent claims of individuality against the impersonal forces of history. The widely proclaimed "Death of the Author," as authorship threatened to dissolve into discourse or into the collaborative forms of textual production, has in recent years been vehemently denied, in the case of Shakespeare, by the spate of recent biographies and the sudden critical focus on "Shakespeare the Thinker." (1) The author lives; the postmodern understanding of discourse is denied, as is the New Historical understanding of a premodern literary system.
In truth, the historical author only ever died, one could say, historically. That is, Shakespeare died in 1616, but as a writer he lived (pace Barthes), active, thoughtful, and willful, even as his intentions were sometimes compromised in the necessary collaborations of the theater and the printing house, and as his thought was necessarily affected (not imprisoned) by the discourses that circulated and by the language in which he did his thinking. One needn't choose between two false alternatives: a Shakespeare unfettered by history or language, or a Shakespeare who is a mere epiphenomenon of one or the other.
But that is the way things have largely gone, or at least the way things have been construed by those few who would take one or the other of the extreme and indefensible positions. More sensible is to recognize Shakespeare's agency within the conditions of possibility for writers in his time. The difficulty posed by this, however, is that this seems to leave us with a Shakespeare whose plays have granted him an iconic cultural position as an author but that were written, performed, and published in artistic, legal, and institutional circumstances that do not quite allow the idea of authorship in any robust, historically specific sense to be applied--not least because Shakespeare (unlike, say, Jonson) seems to have had no interest in it. As my epigraph above, from the film Shakespeare in Love, suggests, in the early modern theater, the author was not of primary importance.
This is not, of course, to say that playwrights always happily acceded to this fact. There is indeed evidence of playwrights (and not just Jonson) using print to assert the authority of their creation against the reshapings of the theater or to defend it from the hostility of its audiences. The title page of Webster's Duchess of Malfi (1623) announces that the published text appears "with diuerse things Printed, that the length of the Play would not beare in the Presentment" (although it, contradictorily, also insists that it offers the text "As it was Presented priuatly, at the Blackfriars, and publiquely at the Globe, By the Kings Maiesties Seruants"). Robert Daborne, in his preface to A Christian Turn'd Turk (1612), admits, "I haue, so farre as my weake power extended, procured the publishing this oppressed and martird Tragedy" (sig. A3r), just as Webster, in the same year, includes a preface to The White Devil in which he defends his actions: "In publishing this Tragedy I do but challenge to my selfe that liberty, which other men haue tane before mee ... since it was acted, in so dull a time of Winter, presented in so open and blacke a Theater, that it wanted ... a full and understanding auditory" (sig. A2r). Playwrights did occasionally assert their right to publish their plays (Heywood noting that "some have used a double sale of their labours, first to the Stage, and after to the presse"), but the number of these is small and the authors almost always at least overtly apologetic for, what John Ford calls, "My presumption of coming in Print." (2)
It has been usual, however, to insist, since Shakespeare was not one of those who presumptuously claimed "that liberty" to publish (perhaps because, as a sharer, he didn't have to), that print was not the form of publication he sought for his plays. Scholars, of course, have long made much of the distinction between the Shakespeare who wrote for the stage and the one whose two long poems appeared published by Richard Field, carefully printed and with dedications by Shakespeare. Shakespeare the poet wrote for readers and seemed (except perhaps in the...
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