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Article Excerpt
Can this cock-pit hold
The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt? O pardon: since a crooked figure may Attest in little place a million, And let us, ciphers to this great account, On your imaginary forces work. (Henry V, Prologue 11-18)
A good way to understand how a complex object works is to watch it break. This programming axiom also holds true both in digital scholarly editing and in playing on the early modern stage. The Chorus of Shakespeare's Henry V offers similar advice to anyone working with old forms in new environments, whether Elizabethan playhouses or graphic interfaces of electronic editions. In an opening gambit not unlike Jerome McGann's in "The Rationale of HyperText," the Chorus expresses weariness with "lofty reflections on the cultural significance" of his chosen medium as he discloses its representational limits (2001, 53). Most of us, sadly, do not have a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention, a kingdom for a stage, and princes to act; the screen obviously cannot hold the vasty fields of France, nor can we expect pixels to cram within this electronic O the very casques that did affright the air at Agincourt. It is not the brightest heaven of invention, but a more practical kind that must happen right there in the play-house if the venture is to succeed. As the Chorus proposes this distinction, it becomes apparent that his apology for the inadequacies of the stage is really not an apology at all. This is the Shakespearean version of the defense Microsoft has been known to make of its operating systems and Web browsers: the bugs are not really bugs, but features. (1) The Chorus even uses a curiously digital metaphor to emphasize his point. The image of a "crooked figure," a zero, multiplying a number into the millions seems an appropriate metaphor for an electronic edition that relies on a great deal of unseen code to enrich readers' potential experiences with a text. As the editor of an electronic edition of the 1594 quarto The Taming of a Shrew--another play about watching plays--forthcoming from the Internet Shakespeare Editions, I find some encouragement in the idea that bugs can be features, that the badness of a supposed bad quarto may indeed be a virtue, and that there is much to learn from the play's uneasy relationship with print editions.
The Taming of a Shrew has long been perceived as a broken piece of the great Shakespearean editorial mechanism. Although many editors and critics still refer to the play as a bad quarto, it does not fit satisfactorily into that category, nor does the category itself sit untroubled within current theories of early modern authorship and textual transmission. Nevertheless, the text of A Shrew is frequently broken up by editors for reintegration into The Shrew. Leah Marcus uses the term "Shakespearish" to describe sections of A Shrew that editors use to supplement the properly Shakespearean play, The Taming of the Shrew (1996, 128). As a so-called bad quarto, A Shrew has not done well for itself where adjectives are concerned, and the ambivalent value judgments one might infer from "Shakespearish" are not out of place in the play's editorial and reception history. The quarto probably does not represent Shakespeare's writing, but it does contain a complete frame story for Christopher Sly that has tempted Shakespeareans since Alexander Pope's edition of 1725. A Shrew's Sly remains on stage throughout the play, commenting on the action at two points, intervening at a third, and finally waking up from his dream, full of Shrew-taming zeal, in an epilogue. Editors and performers of The Shrew have variously conflated, footnoted, and appended A Shrew's Sly material. (2) Since the usual means of breaking A Shrew are the visual codes of the printed page, one may regard the question of the Shrews as a problem of interface design in critical editing--though the solution will be more than a matter of design, requiring a holistic understanding of information technology together with irregular literary materials like A Shrew.
This essay describes some of the issues at stake in designing an edition of A Shrew for delivery over the Web, but also situates the work of interface design within concerns specific to A Shrew's troubled critical history. Traditional approaches to interface design that come from computer science and engineering tend to assume a certain autonomy between form and content. (3) This digital editing project, however, offers the rationale that any new traditions of interface design that develop within the digital humanities--especially within literary, performance, and textual studies--will be worth-while only if they engage the thorny, even intractable particulars of their materials. Designing an edition, digital or otherwise, is not a straightforward process of tool-building, but a creative act bound up with the cultural history of a text--something interface design shares with dramatic adaptation. With this broad scope of editorial responsibility in mind, the discussion that follows will arrive at an explanation of key features of a digital edition of A Shrew, but will first explore two topics that deeply influence any attempt to study or edit the play: authorship and conflation. A Shrew's textual and metadramatic idiosyncrasies touch on questions of critical and editorial method with broad implications for representing dramatic literature in new media, and for understanding tensions between digital tools and literary materials. As the Chorus insistently reminds us, the technology that constitutes a medium is not external to the audience; it inheres not only in the planks of the stage and the pixels on the screen, but also in the conceptual categories we use to make meaning out of what we see.
The Good, the Bad, and the Anonymous
Categorical ambiguity plays a considerable role in determining A Shrew's reception, as we can see in the links between the play's critical history and the tools of scholarly labour. A Shrew's critical history in the past century has been an unkind one, though the play's fortunes have improved in recent years. (4) It was considered a source (or Old Play) for much of its history, especially after it was labeled as such by Edmund Malone in 1790. The play became an object of debate for modern critics after Peter Alexander labeled it as a bad quarto in 1926. The bad quarto category brought with it a compositional narrative of piracy and incompetent reproduction, though the amount of original material in A Shrew prevents an easy fit within the category. Alexander's argument succeeded at least in reopening debate to the possibility of A Shrew as a derived play, but his labeling of A Shrew as "no more than a pirate's version" unnecessarily tied a particular mode of authorship to the apparent composition order of the two Shrew plays (1926, 614). Many critics now treat the two Shrews as distinct works, yet the texts' exact relationship remains undetermined, and subject to one of the most convoluted debates in the Shakespearean tradition. The debate is not helped by the absence of external evidence to measure hypotheses against; as for internal evidence and stylistic attribution, the critical project to attribute A Shrew's exact authorship has long since lost its bearings. Is A Shrew the source for Shakespeare's play or a derivation from it? If the latter, does it derive from the Folio version of The Shrew, or from another version now lost? (5) To the first question, the answer my edition will offer is that A Shrew is likely a creative adaptation of Shakespeare's play, and, more importantly, a critical response to it. (The second question, which deals with the possibility of revisions in Shakespeare's play, involves a complex debate beyond the scope of this article.) The writers of A Shrew were probably actors in the short-lived Pembroke's Men company, who may have worked with Shakespeare in 1592-93. (6) They performed some version of Shakespeare's play during that period and created their own version, in some ways a subversion, when Shakespeare left the company as its fortunes declined in late 1593-94. The actors, perhaps with help, created a new dramatic work that makes specific, systematic references to Shakespeare, just as it does to Marlowe. (7) A Shrew's frequent borrowing from other works is one of its most inventive features, especially when it parodies Marlowe, but borrowing can invite the stigma of piracy. As an editor of the play, I believe this authorship narrative to be no more or less consistent with the evidence than most of the others. However, the vacuum of evidence leaves room for other forces, such as the Shakespeare canon, to shape ideas about A Shrew's origins.
The long shadow cast by Shakespeare challenges our ability to approach A Shrew as anything other than the second term in a comparison. It is deceptively easy to juxtapose A Shrew with The Shrew, and all but impossible simply to read the quarto play on its own. For many years A Shrew's anonymity stood as the biggest impediment to approaching the play as a freestanding dramatic work. After many years of speculation, we have a list of candidates for authorship but no one to name with any confidence. Stylistic cases have been made for Marlowe, Greene, Peele, and Rowley, among others, but in the absence of reliable external evidence, no candidate (or suspect) has met with widespread critical approval. For the purposes of critical editing, however, A Shrew's anonymity is now less of a problem than it once was. Late-twentieth century developments in textual scholarship, notably D.F. McKenzie's social-text approach and its de-emphasis of authorial intention, have enabled editors to produce critical texts of plays like A Shrew without the need for tenuous attributions to single, established authorial figures. Most recent theories of textual production hold that literary texts have lives apart from their authors, and that those lives are worth understanding. Yet, for all this, categories such as bad quarto have a power of stubbornness that resists theory, especially when they offer to impose order upon complex materials--when, in other words, such categories function as conceptual tools.
A Shrew is often caught between just such conflicts between categorization and sensitivity to special cases. Witness W.W. Greg's difficulty in his magisterial study The Shakespeare First Folio, where he enumerates a number of features A Shrew shares with the model of a bad quarto (shortness, evidence of memorial reconstruction), but stops short of categorizing it with confidence:
All the same A Shrew is not a "bad" quarto of the usual type. Its points of verbal contact with The Shrew are comparatively rare ... In fact, although here and there it shows unmistakable signs of memorization, it would need to be regarded, not so much as a reconstruction of an original on the lines of The Shrew, as an imitation based on a recollection of it. (Greg 1955, 210-11)
Later, assessing Peter Alexander's hypothesis that A Shrew is a...
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