In the past thirty years, mounting evidence that Shakespeare considered himself not only as a playwright but also as a literary dramatist who wanted to be read requires scholars of Early Modern English drama to consider the effects of his works both on the printed page as well as on the London stage. But the surviving documents make it difficult for scholars to determine Shakespeare’s actual intentions, for, though his plays were widely printed, none of Shakespeare’s holograph manuscripts survive, and the documentary evidence of his plays in print offers a series of textual curiosities that require both explanation and educated speculation. A significant proportion of Shakespeare’s plays, including canonical works like Hamlet, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet and Henry V, exist in multiple versions that have substantive variations between them. Since the eighteenth century, scholars have floated diverse theories to explain these discrepancies, and most of them rely on the interference of non-authorial agents like actors, prompters, scribes, compositors, audience members, printers, publishers, and booksellers.
Many of these theories of non-authorial interference, such as memorial reconstruction by actors or censorship by stationers, are highly improbable but narratively compelling, and as a result, these models often feature prominently in the textual introductions of Shakespeare’s plays despite their logical and historical inaccuracies. The scholars that we have assembled for this panel offer a corrective to these dominant approaches to Shakespeare’s plays by presenting work that demonstrates the ways that that the variations in the documentary evidence resulted from the actions of Shakespeare himself. Taken together, the four papers on this panel provide evidence that Shakespeare was a compulsive self-editor and reviser, regularly returning to offer updated or alternative versions of his works.
The panelists each approach the question of Shakespeare as a reviser from a different angle. Meghan Andrews considers the way that Shakespeare’s early career writing collaborative history plays put him in conversation with authors like Michael Drayton, and she argues that the publication of Drayton’s Englands Heroicall Epistles (1597/98) inspired Shakespeare’s revision of The First Part of the Contention (1594) into what became the “official” text of 2 Henry VI (1623). Alan B. Farmer uses quantitative evidence in support of his claim that Shakespeare was one of the best-selling authors in theEnglish book trade, one who was sold to readers as unusually committed to the accuracy of the printed texts of his plays, ultimately suggesting that Shakespeare had a (hitherto-unknown) commercial relationship with publisher Andrew Wise. By reading dramaturgically, Stephen Urkowitz shows how even minor variations in Shakespeare’s multiple-text plays reveal cohesive, structural patterns that should properly be understood as the deliberate actions of a playwright committed to such issues as characterization, plotting and stage action. He suggests that these changes demonstrate careful attention to both coherent and chaotic emotions projected from stage to audience. And finally, Qingyu Wang draws on studies of kingship and resistance theory to argue that the variant texts of Richard II resulted from political pressure, which raises questions about the relationship between Shakespeare’s original intentions and revision which results from censorship. She argues that modern critical editions of the play should incorporate these extra-authorial revisions in parallel text presentation.