Peter Holland：Sexy Shakespeare

王敖

<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="400" border="0"><tbody><tr><td><table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="400" border="0"><tbody><tr><td valign="top"><div class="textcopy"><p>William Shakespeare<br />THE RSC SHAKESPEARE <br />Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen<br />2,486pp. Macmillan. &pound;30.<br />978 0 230 0350 7<br />&nbsp;<br /><br />In 1887, Henry Irving began collaborating with his friend Frank Marshall on an edition of Shakespeare. The aim was to bring the plays to the general reader, then still a creature in no immediate danger of extinction, in a way that combined the latest scholarship of F. J. Furnivall in England and H. H. Furness in America with some sense of the plays in performance. Published in eight volumes over the next three years, The Henry Irving Shakespeare included illustrations by Gordon Browne which, while not representing performance directly, suggested current styles of stage costume, and notes by Irving on cuts in the text, both those used by professional commercial companies like his own and those that would make public readings or amateur productions practicable. The final volume to appear contained a general introduction and a biography of Shakespeare written by Edward Dowden, the foremost critic of the age.</p><p><br />There had been many editions of performance texts before this, including John Philip Kemble’s acting editions and those by Charles Kean who proudly recorded the historical authenticity and antiquarian sources of his productions and ensured that his name on the title page was followed by his FSA, as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. Earlier, there were the editions published by John Bell, starting in 1773, of the plays “as they are now performed at the Theatres Royal in London”, based on the prompt-books for the plays in the repertory and with suggestions by Francis Gentleman for the right way to adapt the plays not currently being performed. Though Kemble’s and Kean’s names were very visible in their texts and though Bell’s text emphasized its connection with the London stages, none was quite so emphatic in their linking of actor and author as The Henry Irving Shakespeare, and, as far as I know, there was no successor in quite that style. There is no Olivier Shakespeare or Gielgud Shakespeare, nor did Lilian Baylis edit an Old Vic Shakespeare.<br /></p><p>Now there is a Complete Works edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, already widely known as The RSC Shakespeare, a handsome piece of book-making, for all that the cover design suggests the future marketing of matching curtains. The publicity for the volume has trumpeted the fact that, for the first time ever, it is the First Folio (F1 as scholars call it) of 1623 that provides the basis for the text. This is, in effect, an edition of F1, a modernized, corrected and annotated version of that text, with Bate in overall charge, Rasmussen tightly controlling the textual matters, and Hélo&iuml;se Sénéchal supervising the commentary.</p><p><br />But in what way is it The RSC Shakespeare? Nestling on page 64, after Bate’s typically invigorating General Introduction, after the especially necessary User’s Guide and a modernized version of the prelims to F1 (commendatory poems and all), comes a one-page foreword by Michael Boyd, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Artistic Director: a rather bland set of recommendations to readers to remember that they are “reading scripts”, not to be “put off by any sense that his work might be difficult to appreciate”, to “trust the author” and to “be inspired”. A few pages of photographs of RSC productions (and one visiting production) have good captions but are often disappointingly predictable choices: a head-shot of Paul Scofield as Lear does nothing to show how Peter Brook’s production “portrayed a dark and primitive world” in the clear way a still from the performance’s opening scene would have done; an image of Ian McKellen and Judi Dench as the Macbeths does not hint at “the intensity of an intimate Macbeth in the tiny ‘black box’ of The Other Place”, as a shot of the circle of light within which they worked and around which the rest of the cast and the audience sat would have done.</p><p><br />Thereafter, for the remaining all-but 2,500 pages of plays and poems, the RSC-ness of The RSC Shakespeare is an invisible element, apart from some passing production details in Bate’s sharp introductions to the individual plays. The RSC Shakespeare is an example of corporate branding, of commercial exploitation of a marketable logo, of product recognition offering a guarantee of quality and desirability. What it is not is an edition that directly engages with the history and practice of the Royal Shakespeare Company, with the multiple discoveries that the directors, actors and designers of the company have made about the plays, line by line and scene by scene, ever since Peter Hall created the brand name. Henry Irving was an active collaborator throughout the edition that bears his name, but The RSC Shakespeare is more the product of the company’s Marketing Department than the rehearsal room and production record.<br /></p><p>One of the virtues of the approach Bate and Rasmussen have taken is to offer fresh ways of presenting the plays. Some at least of these are reflections of performance texts. So the “Key Facts” box for each play (so helpful when revising for exams) gives a list of major roles in descending order according to the percentage of lines, recording for each the number of speeches and scenes. The lists reveal much about, say, the dominance of Hamlet (37 per cent of the lines) or Richard III (32 per cent) or Prospero (30 per cent), and the intriguing fact that Theseus, onstage for only three scenes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is very nearly as substantial a role as Bottom or Helena in the ensemble of the play. Helpful for trivia questions it may be (I would not have guessed that Troilus is a longer role than Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida), but the information serves a much more serious critical function than that, throwing into relief the comparative silence of Gertrude, onstage for ten scenes but with no more lines than Ophelia, or the way a small role like Princess Katherine in Henry V, with 2 per cent of the lines and only two scenes, can have a theatrical impact out of proportion to the role’s size, or the shrinking presence of Prince Henry between the two parts of Henry IV (18 per cent of the lines in Part One but only 9 per cent in Part Two, while Falstaff scores 20 per cent in each part).</p><p><br />Unlike the quartos, F1 makes at least an attempt at dividing the plays into acts and scenes. F1’s occasionally half-hearted representation in five acts even of plays originally given continuous performance at the Globe, in part a reflection of theatrical practice by the 1620s, with act-divisions a standard feature of indoor performance at the Blackfriars Theatre (among other reasons, they enabled the candles to be trimmed or replaced), and in part a reflection of the classical dignity that Ben Jonson had given his plays in his collected edition of 1616, is rightly followed and completed here, so that Hamlet has more than the first three scenes of Act One and the start of Act Two marked. A quarto-based edition might have opted simply for continuous numbering of scenes, but Bate and Rasmussen reflect the theatrical experience of continuous performance by balancing the act and scene divisions with a useful innovation: a “running scene” count that enables the reader to be aware that, say, A Midsummer Night’s Dream has only seven scenes in all, as, for instance, “running scene 4” includes both Act Two Scene Two and Act Three Scene One, with Titania asleep onstage across the act-break. Occasionally arguable, as the editors well know, the running scene numbering reminds us that, in the course of any performance without act-breaks, no member of the audience other than a Shakespeare scholar has the slightest idea whether he or she is watching Act Three or Four – and couldn’t care less either.</p><p><br />All of this is well and good, and effectively conscious of performance. Problems arise, as so often in Shakespeare editions, with stage directions. Editions are made up of thousands of small choices, but the detail matters greatly to our understanding of what might happen and what the stage-event might mean. Picking on an example or three may indeed sound picky, but they will have to stand for the problematic significance a direction has for the potential of performance, future or imaginary, and as a record of performances past. Theatrical meaning is generated moment by moment – not only by some overall directorial concept – and the opening up or closing down of possibility is crucial to a reader’s understanding of the plays’ ways of making meaning. As radical and original here as elsewhere, the editors have separated F1-style directions (mostly entrances and exits) from what they dub “directorial interventions”, the former in the run of the text, the latter in the margin in a different typeface. They also include “permissive stage directions” such as “Aside?” or “may exit”, leaving reader and production to decide whether this is a good idea. At times this permissiveness is oddly questioning of what seems unquestionable. In Troilus and Cressida, Troilus’ sleeve, his parting gift to Cressida, moves to and fro between Cressida and Diomede in the scene that Troilus watches. Clearly Cressida has the sleeve when she enters, Diomede has it when Cressida says “Give’t me again”, and Cressida has it when she says “I have’t again”. Directions saying “She may give him the sleeve” or “She may take back the sleeve” are unhelpfully permissive, unless the open quality of the latter direction is an indication that, instead of taking it back, she may be given it by Diomede. Nor does it help to add “She may attempt to take back the sleeve” when Diomede says, “Nay, do not snatch it from me”. Such stage directions add little and seem merely to state the obvious.<br />But what happens on stage in The Taming of the Shrew when Petruccio says of Katherine, “Why does the world report that Kate doth limp?”? (It is, incidentally, disappointing to see the editors accept for speech-prefixes Petruccio’s diminutive form of Katherine’s name as “Kate” when she is so clear about its proper form, “They call me Katherine that do talk of me”: the same trick of power-based nicknaming that Henry V will use with his Katherine. Such choices are not trivial in the way they accept one character’s view of another, here an act of control. Calling her “Kate” every time she speaks clouds the reader’s perception and is also in conflict with the edition’s and F1’s stage directions for “Katherina”.) According to The RSC Shakespeare, “Kate” might be limping because Petruccio “kicks her”. I am sure there must have been Petruccios who have kicked their Katherines at this point, though I cannot remember any, but, because the commentary is silent, the question mark after the marginal direction has to do a great deal of work to invite the reader to consider other possible events: perhaps she does not limp at all (few Katherines do), perhaps she has tripped, perhaps she has turned her ankle. But neither a Katherine who is silent when kicked, nor a Petruccio confident enough and brutal enough to kick her at this stage of their relationship, seems so likely that the stage direction is warranted.</p><p><br />At the play’s end, after Katherine’s long speech, by far her longest in the whole play – for she is a strikingly quiet shrew – Petruccio’s “Come on, and kiss me, Kate” attracts the direction “They kiss”, without so much as a question mark to throw doubt on the action. But how do we know they kiss? Many RSC productions have shown a Katherine completely unable to kiss the man who has wagered on her obedience; others have shown a woman delighted to kiss the man she loves. A performance-aware edition, especially an edition aware of the RSC’s own history, could have opened readers’ minds to the conflicting, mutually exclusive possibilities at this point.<br />Sometimes it is the commentary that has strange effects on the meaning of stage directions. When King Lear first enters, the 1608 quarto has him preceded by “one bearing a coronet” and, though F1 does not include this “one”, the editors break their own rules and for some reason import Q1’s anonymous servant. Shakespeare is precise about coronets, with Casca first naming the object offered to Julius Caesar “a crown” and then redefining it: “yet ’twas not a crown neither, ’twas one of these coronets”. Since Lear will, after disinheriting Cordelia, later instruct Cornwall and Albany, “This coronet part between you”, it seems quite likely (though not definite) that the coronet is Cordelia’s. It doesn’t of course have to have been brought in separately; Lear could, for instance, snatch it off Cordelia’s head at this point. The commentary glosses “bearing a coronet” both as “carrying a small crown” and “wearing a wreath or garland about the head”. The latter explanation makes no sense to me whatsoever. Of course “bearing” can mean “wearing”, but examples of the word “coronet” meaning in that period a “garland” are vulnerable and, though the OED quotes A Midsummer Night’s Dream as the first example for this sense, the line “With coronet of fresh and fragrant flowers” need not precisely mean that a coronet is a garland but rather that the word is being used as a kind of metaphor: Titania has crowned Bottom (or “coroneted” him). And why on earth would someone wearing a garland precede the King of Britain? And what would an early modern audience – or any other audience, for that matter – understand such an odd ceremonial entry to mean? That such an entry might be neatly proleptic of Cordelia’s description of the mad Lear, “Crowned with rank fumiter and furrow weeds” (which he may or may not be wearing when he enters a few scenes later, but which the editors are confident he does still have on), is not in itself justification for such a bizarrely dressed leader of the procession.</p><p><br />I don’t want to be breaking a butterfly but the problems with this single commentary note don’t end there. The coronet, the commentary assures us, “must be of material that can be broken in half”, but this is to read Lear’s instruction to “part” it too literally, to assume that the speech and a stage-event are aligned. The exhilarating theatrical point may be precisely that the coronet cannot be divided, that, try as they might, neither Lear nor his sons-in-law can split the metal ring, that the circle, such a potent sign of wholeness, will not break – especially in a play fascinated by the way “The wheel is come full circle”, as the dying Edmund puts it. A trick coronet is not necessarily required; an equally potent theatrical possibility is easily available without resorting to special effects.<br /></p><p>Seizing on this example may be unfair when so much of the commentary is newly conceived, alive to the possibilities of early modern English and of Shakespeare’s transformations of it. This is the first full-scale commentary to be able to use the riches of electronic databases such as the Lexicon of Early Modern English and it has taken full advantage of them. It is also strikingly aware of Shakespeare’s sexual language, trusting the superb scholarly research of Gordon Williams. There is no room here for the vagueness of a commentary note pointing to an unexplained sexual meaning. Here, every spade is called a penis. And here too Bate and Sénéchal go so much further than previous editors that sometimes even my pleasure in bawdiness cannot keep up with them. Williams accepts, though the OED does not, that the word “come” could mean “orgasm” at that period, but it does not follow that it does so quite as frequently as here. Full of sexual meanings though Cleopatra’s idiolect may be, I am not really sure that “Husband, I come” has “connotations of orgasm” or that her seeing Antony “rouse himself” has “connotations of penile erection”. And Orsino’s description of the music’s “dying fall” has such a faint echo of “the sense of orgasm and detumescence” as to be completely inaudible to me. Sometimes this commentary has a dirty mind – rightly when it goes to town on Mercutio’s language (though is “O” in “O Romeo, that she were, O, that she were / An open arse” really yet “another vaginal pun”?), but a little crassly when it states unequivocally the presence of a sexual meaning that may or may not be there. It is good to be made aware of a Shakespeare as raunchy as this, so much enjoying the ways in which English can make hundreds of words have double meanings, but the potency of language may be in the eye of the beholder and not in the control of the speaker: when William Page in his Latin lesson in The Merry Wives of Windsor says “O, vocative O”, he may – or, more likely, may not – know that “O” is “suggestive of the vagina”.</p><p><br />The first edition of Romeo and Juliet I read in school had cut some of the rudest lines, though the preface’s identification of which lines had been cut sent us all rushing off to a Complete Works to find out what was being kept from us; we could make little sense of Mercutio on the medlar tree, even with the help of a dictionary. As teachers desperately search for ways to prove Shakespeare’s relevance to teenagers of the iGeneration who have no interest in anything not about themselves, The RSC Shakespeare may perform a useful public service, even if it may also provoke protests from American parents, so overanxious and overprotective about sex.</p><p><br />If this sexy Shakespeare broadens our sense of the author, Bate and Rasmussen have had to do some nifty footwork around the texts which are not in F1 in ways that narrow our vision of Shakespeare’s range. Since The RSC Shakespeare could hardly do without Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen, two plays not in F1, they are tacked on at the end in double-columns, as are the long poems and the Sonnets. But yet again, as in so many other editions, Shakespeare’s sections of Sir Thomas More, the “Hand D” scenes, are printed in not-so-splendid isolation from the rest of the play, so that, unlike the experience of reading the whole play in the second edition of the Oxford Complete Works, the reader here cannot tell at all what the play into which these additions were inserted was like. Bate and Rasmussen distrust the argument that Shakespeare wrote scenes in Edward III or, as MacDonald P. Jackson has been strongly arguing, a scene in Arden of Faversham, and both are excluded (that both are available on the edition’s website www.rscshakespeare.co.uk is not really a compensation). While collaborative plays like Henry VI, Part 1 or Henry VIII are in the volume complete, these other possible collaborations are dropped, reducing our sense of Shakespeare’s involvement in the work of others, his connection to the multi-authorship practices of much early modern drama. Gone, too, is the poem “A Lover’s Complaint”, in the light of Brian Vickers’s convincing arguments against attributing it to Shakespeare.</p><p><br />To continue the “who’s in, who’s out” list: the epilogue to the Queen for Shrovetide 1599, first printed in the Riverside edition and which Juliet Dusinberre has linked to As You Like It, is in, with Bate overstepping the mark in describing the attribution as “absolutely secure”. There is no external evidence at all for the attribution, and the parallel of a form of genitive with an occurrence in Antony and Cleopatra is a weak basis for the case since, as Jonathan Hope has recently demonstrated, this form was common; especially when “circular”, one of the few uncommon words in the poem, is not used by Shakespeare elsewhere but is used by a number of other dramatists and poets. If Shakespeare did write an epilogue for Court performance, this changes our perception of his involvement in the world of the Court. James Shapiro, one of the poem’s advocates, emphasized this in his Shakespeare microbiography, 1599, but I wish I were confident enough of my ear to say, with Shapiro, that the epilogue’s style and diction are “unmistakably Shakespearean”. There are stronger reasons to include a number of short epigrams excluded by Bate and Rasmussen: the serious epitaph on Elias James, the two comic ones on John Combe, and the lines inscribed on Shakespeare’s own grave, all of which are firmly ascribed to Shakespeare in seventeenth-century manuscripts. Those ascriptions do not prove the poems are by Shakespeare, but the evidence is stronger than it is for the Shrovetide epilogue, however much one likes its delicate style.</p><p><br />In the end, it is not these marginal cases that will matter in deciding how good, how important, or how useful The RSC Shakespeare will prove to be. I look forward to using it at my desk and perhaps in my classroom over many years, enjoying Jonathan Bate’s perceptive comments, trusting Eric Rasmussen’s textual scholarship – and always questioning what the edition and the texts themselves can tell us about how performance generates meanings, not some idealized single way of playing, but the kinds of unending, astute, exhilarating, demanding, creative, rigorous, exhausting investigations of potentiality that have always been the hallmark of the Royal Shakespeare Company itself at its magnificent best.</p><p>_______________________________________________________<br /><br />eter Holland is currently President of the Shakespeare Association of America and Editor of <em>Shakespeare Survey</em>. He wrote the entry on William Shakespeare for the <em>Oxford Dictionary of National Biography</em> and recently co-edited <em>Shakespeare, Memory and Performance</em>, published last year.<br /></p></div></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr><tr><td height="20"><img height="20" alt="" src="http://images.thetimes.co.uk/images/trans.gif" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr></tbody></table>