CDiPietro Introduction Shakespeares Intentions

Style: Volume 44, No. 3, Fall 2010 293

Cary DiPietroUniversity of Toronto, Mississauga

Introduction: Shakespeare’s Intentions

Writing in 1928, in lectures that would eventually be published in the polemical

volume A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf offered her own view of

Shakespeare’s creative authorship: “For though we say that we know nothing about

Shakespeare’s state of mind,” she wrote at the very midpoint of her essay, an essay

that otherwise addresses the topic of women and fiction,

even as we say that, we are saying something about Shakespeare’s state of mind. The reason perhaps why we know so little of Shakespeare—compared with Donne or Ben Jonson or Milton—is that his grudges and spites and antipathies are hidden from us. We are not held up by some “revelation” which reminds us of the writer. All desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an injury, to pay off a score, to make the world the witness of some hardship or grievance was fired out of him and consumed. Therefore his poetry flows from him free and unimpeded. (66)

Though characteristically mellifluous, Woolf’s writing in Room is marked by

numerous contradictions, many of them deliberate, and not the least of which is

her Shakespeare, held up as a model for women writers because he represents, in

Coleridgean terms, an androgynous ideal. In a subsequent chapter, she explains

that women writers “think back” through their mothers (88), the first of whom, by

way of sequential metaphors revolving around such concepts as anonymity and

androgyny, turns out to be Shakespeare.

Shakespeare was, for Woolf, “incandescent and undivided” (114), terms she

used to describe that imaginative essence or core implied by the name “Shakespeare”

which she understood to be the single, originating source for the poetry that bears

his name, “poetry” here to mean, rather than a conventional genre of writing, the

creative product of his imagination. “Incandescence” describes the process that

sees Shakespeare’s imagination—as Coleridge would have it, his “esemplastic

power”—released “whole and entire” (Woolf 66) from his mind, unimpeded by any

personal convictions or agendas, and therefore undivided. The relationship between

Shakespeare’s creative genius and the body of writing that has descended to us is

therefore one of unproblematic metonymy in Woolf’s writing.

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Despite this romanticist investment in such concepts as genius and imagination,

however, Shakespeare remains central to her material demands, explicit in the title

of the volume, that women need a room of their own and five hundred pounds a

year to write fiction. Thus, she writes:

fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in. (48-9)

Woolf invents the fictional Judith Shakespeare to imagine the life of a female writer

born with Shakespeare’s genius. Building upon the title of the essay, she develops

the comparison through a series of spatial metaphors: while Shakespeare was sent to

school, moved freely in the streets and through the neighborhoods of Warwickshire,

moved to London, entered the theatre, lived at the hub of the universe, and even

gained access to the palace of the queen, Judith’s story is one of barred entry or

surreptitious movement; not sent to school, confined to domestic duties, and hidden

in the apple loft to do her writing, when Judith escapes to London, she is unable

to enter a tavern or walk the streets by moonlight, and is finally denied entry at the

door of her brother’s theatre, driving her to suicide.

I’ve chosen to begin this discussion of Shakespeare and the perennial question

of authorial intention by, rather than summarizing and positioning the arguments

and counterarguments that follow in this special issue instead, putting forth for our

consideration a concrete example, in this case, of a well-known writer speculating

on the nature of Shakespeare’s authorship. I use the term “writer” to describe Woolf

rather than “author” because the construction of her own authorship is precisely

what is at stake in the essay; “authorship” in this sense includes her authority as a

writer and the power implied by origination and invention.1 “Authorial intention” or

any derivatives of that coinage are not used or invoked by Woolf, an omission partly

explained by the fact that A Room predates by several years the rise to hegemony

of the vocabulary of “intention” heralded by William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C.

Beardsley’s 1946 essay, “The Intentional Fallacy.”2 Woolf is not concerned with

the question of intention per se—though she does assume a linear communicative

structure between the author, whose particular mental activity is required to produce

great works of literature, and an ideal reader. What I would like to consider in this

opening discussion, however, is the way that Woolf constructs her own authorship

through the example of Shakespeare, and how this anticipates a discursive trajectory

Introduction: Shakespeare’s Intentions 295

that begins with the intentional fallacy some two decades later and continues through

our own ongoing discussion of authorial intention. Woolf’s is a fascinating and

illuminating case study, and I raise it here at considerable length because, I argue,

it bears immediately upon the professional context of our current discussion.

On the one hand, her version of Shakespeare seems quaintly antiquated. There

are, to begin, fallacious assumptions about Shakespeare’s authorship and biography

that descend, unchallenged, from familiar nineteenth-century lore: in a synoptic

biography in Chapter 3, Shakespeare rises from deer poacher and immodest youth

to horse attendant and, later, dramatic genius who “never blotted a line.” There is

also an uneasy equivalence of genre in Woolf’s writing, as if the writing of plays,

poems, and fiction all required the same imaginative investment, despite the differing

material circumstances that enabled their production. While she praises Shakespeare

for, in some sense, “concealing” himself in his plays, she fails to account for rather

obvious differences between dramatic and non-dramatic writing; not without reason,

debate about authorial intention has tended to revolve around third-person narration

and, to a lesser extent, first-person speakers in poetry, where the temptation to “hear”

the voice of the writer speaking through the text is inevitably greater. Shakespeare’s

sonnets are an exemplary case in point: biographical interpretation of the sonnets

had reached a fever pitch in the half-generation of writers prior to Woolf (one thinks

of Oscar Wilde’s “The Portrait of Mr W. H.” published in Blackwood’s Magazine

in 1889), and that Woolf should omit discussion of the sonnets and contemporary

sonnet theories in the many places she theorized about Shakespeare’s “anonymity”

seems not a little conspicuous.3

On the other hand, Woolf is highly conscious of her own narratorial voice in

Room. She writes the essay as a narrative structure of plot and character, and she

explicitly calls attention to the constructed nature of the identity who “speaks” (the

essay derives from a series of lectures Woolf delivered to the women’s colleges at

Cambridge in 1928): “‘I’ is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real

being” (4-5), states the narrator, denying the fixed identity of a name and instead

offering to share her identity with those of the characters she later introduces: “call

me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please—it is

not a matter of any importance” (5). Part of the reason for this self-conscious play

on narrative identity is the genre in which she writes, the familiar essay, a form

popular in the nineteenth century, but often traced back to Bacon, and through him

to Montaigne in the sixteenth century, who is commonly said to have invented the

“I.” For Woolf, this “I” represents a male strategy of writing, a gendered textual

position from which male writers, historically, have pronounced on women. Her

296 Cary DiPietro

attempt to evade the “I” in her own writing is, therefore, demonstrative of her desire

to transcend the gendered history of writing; the impersonal “One” of Room is,

indeed, a carefully chosen personal pronoun, neither “my” nor “her.” But Woolf’s

evasion also explains her elevation of Shakespeare as a relatively “anonymous”

and androgynous ideal.

Shakespeare thus becomes a paradoxical figure in Room because he represents

an archetypal genius in a way that seems consistent with what George Bernard Shaw,

heaping derision on the nineteenth-century essayist, called “bardolatry,” while, at

the same time, Shakespeare is also held up as a prescriptive model for a radical

rethinking and re-gendering of authorship. It would be easy to dismiss Woolf’s

use of Shakespeare as a model for female authorship as polemical and historically

particular to the construction of her own authorship in the early twentieth-century.

But we can also read the dialectical tension in her writing between romanticist

and more immediate material interests as indicative of a larger dialectic that was

shaping the practice of literary criticism as she wrote, and which still reverberates

in the arguments between critical methodologies employed in Shakespeare studies

today. Indeed, Shakespeare continues to occupy apparently inconsistent places in

contemporary criticism: on the one hand, as a canonical writer whose centrality

and importance in professional literary studies has continued unabated since their

inception in the late nineteenth century, even while, on the other hand, as a focal

point for debates about authorship, subjectivity, and gendered identity in more

radicalized modes of criticism.

Wimsatt and Beardsley’s place in that history is pivotal. Writing in 1946,

Wimsatt and Beardsley, not unlike Woolf before them, were not concerned with

theoretical debates about authorship and intention. As we’ll see in the essays that

follow, contemporary discussion of these tends to be shaped and directed by later

theorists, many of them poststructuralist, from Derrida and Foucault to Austin and

Searle; moreover, within narrative studies, the discourse of “authorial intention”

has largely been superseded by more sophisticated discussions of narration, reading

communities, “implied” authors, and so on. Rather, the first concern of Wimsatt

and Beardsley was the role of the critic, particularly the social role played by the

critic as a judge of literature and, more specifically in this essay, of poetry: “the

design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for

judging the success of a work of literary art” (3), they argued.

How is that success defined? The remainder of Wimsatt and Beardsley’s essay

is devoted to developing a distinction between the aesthetic and moral concerns of

the artist, which are private and can be imagined or entertained from a Romantic


point of view—and here, they evoke such figures as Wordsworth and Pater—versus

the criteria that are used to measure the work of art’s success in the public sphere

of its reception, its criticism. Our understanding of a poem, they argue, might be

usefully informed by the historical fact of writing or the biography of the writer, but

the intentions of the writer, the “design or plan in the author’s mind . . . the author’s

attitude toward his work, the way he felt, what made him write” (4), have no place

in the critical evaluation of the work of art. If the criteria for that evaluation are not

explicitly defined within the essay, Wimsatt and Beardsley take great pains to make

clear what they are not: the intentional fallacy, they argue, is a Romantic one (6).

The version of criticism promoted in their essay occurs at a pivotal moment in

the early professionalization of literary studies. On the one hand, their use of such

terms as “criticism” and “success” resonates with the social mission of literary

criticism first advocated by Matthew Arnold in the 1880s—that is, criticism as “a

disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought

in the world” (24). Both Arnold and Coleridge are mentioned as key Romantic

poets but also early critics, which would seem to signal Wimsatt and Beardsley’s

awareness of their inheritance from this earlier generation. On the other hand,

the essay explicitly dissociates their critical methodology from the aesthetic and

therefore artistic concerns of “Romantic expression.” The essay thus serves its

function, and not a minor one, in securing the place of criticism in the first half of

the twentieth century as a professional endeavour distinct from literary appreciation,

a profession requiring norms of methodology and empirical methods of analysis.

While the coinage “intentional fallacy” is routinely associated with the formalist

New Criticism, the professionalization of criticism moved forward by Wimsatt and

Beardsley’s essay would eventually see the widening of literary studies to incorporate

other fields of interest; in the main, historiography, anthropology and sociology,

but into the discussion of authorial intention, deconstruction and speech-act theory.

The professionalization of criticism is a story that has been told many times.4 The

significance of this narrative for our purposes here, however, is that we can easily

recognize a tension in “The Intentional Fallacy” between the canonical status of the

high literary authors they discuss—the implicit value conferred upon their works

by a critical methodology that seeks to understand and unveil the “public” ideas

and values these works communicate—and an emergent professionalist critical

discourse that views such universalizing tendencies with increasing suspicion.

This tension persists in Shakespeare and early modern studies today, particularly

in the dialogue between critical methodologies. Consider as an example the 1997

Textual Practice debate about the materiality of the Shakespeare text. The debate

298 Cary DiPietro

followed the publication of an article by Margreta De Grazia and Peter Stallybrass

in Shakespeare Quarterly in 1993, in which they made the argument that early

modern dramatic authorship is, more or less, the result of material printing house

practices: “Our post-Enlightenment critical tradition,” they argued, “has imagined

the author standing above or beyond the categories thus far considered, generating

words, constructing characters, and creating texts that form his collected works.

But all the above illustrations lend support to the simple but profound insight that

‘whatever they may do, authors do not write books’” (273).

They invoke Derrida when they argue that the search for an “authentic”

Shakespeare, particularly in textual editing, is based “on a metaphysics of origin

and presence” (256). Instead, they propose to interrogate the materiality of

the Shakespeare text—its old typefaces and spelling, irregular lines and scene

divisions, and other paratextual matter—not out of an antiquarian interest, but to

emphasize the gaps between the “distinguishing marks of a particular set of early

modern theatrical texts” (257) and the modern “Shakespeare.” De Grazia’s and

Stallybrass’s version of materialism—which, as Gabriel Egan argues in this issue,

has become the default setting, if not for literary criticism, certainly within the field

of early modern studies—articulates a professionalist discourse whose core values

are empiricism and disinterestedness, while it criticizes an author-based literary

study for the elitist values such as genius and creativity it upholds (De Grazia and

Stallybrass 227).

In his response to their article, Edward Pechter begins his own essay with

two epigraphs, one from Northrop Frye, and another from the semiotic critic,

Jonathan Culler. Frye serves as a representative of a literary kind of criticism:

“Understanding a poem,” argues Frye, “begins in a complete surrender . . . to the

impact of the work as a whole, and proceeds through the effort to unite the symbols

toward a simultaneous perception of the unity of the structure” (qtd. in Pechter 51).

Frye’s criticism thus proceeds from an assumption about the wholeness or unity

of the work, and even though Frye avers in parentheses that this is the “logical

sequence” and that he has no idea or interest in “what the psychological sequence

is, or whether there is a sequence,” nevertheless, his understanding requires the

assumption of the wholeness of intention behind the work. Clearly concerned to

avoid the intentional fallacy of Wimsatt and Beardsley, Frye’s is nevertheless an

author-based literary analysis.

The epigraph from Culler is a version of the critique of literary study voiced

by De Grazia and Stallybrass: to “engage in the study of literature,” argues Culler,

“is not to produce yet another interpretation of King Lear but to advance one’s


understanding of the conventions and operations of an institution, a mode of

discourse . . . one thing we do not need is more interpretations of literary works”

(qtd. in Pechter 51). To be sure, De Grazia’s and Stallybrass’s materialism, as

Pechter notes, nevertheless proceeds from assumptions about the wholeness and

integrity of textual reading, albeit a reading of the material signs of the production

of early printed texts—a textual semiotics—rather than the meanings produced by

creative authorship. Pecther argues that, examined within the assumptions of the

history of printing, Shakespeare “will be produced not as an author, as he might be

from within the assumptions of literary study . . . that is, as a phenomenon of its

own disciplinary practices” (54). In other words, literary study and “materiality”

(called elsewhere in this issue the New Textualism) produce different Shakespeares

because they begin from entirely different epistemologies and methodological

assumptions.

Pechter is finally dismissive of such meta-critical disciplinary debates, arguing

that we do not need to take such arguments seriously because “they have no practical

consequences; because they are themselves the consequence of our practice. They

do not shape belief, belief shapes them” (65). We might be inclined to dismiss

the similar debate contained in this issue concerned with authorial intention as a

“consequence of our practice,” produced by and within a discipline as part of its own

discursive self-perpetuation. Nevertheless, what these essays clearly demonstrate is

the connection between what Pechter describes in a different context as “authorial

and textual stability” and “the status and value of literary study” (52). For his part,

Pechter pitches his own camp with Frye and literary study: “For us, surrendering

completely to the impact of [a Shakespeare play] and at the same time exerting

ourselves strenuously to take possession of what possesses us—this is something

we have to do. We do make love to our employment” (65). There is a perhaps subtly

ironic romanticist fetish in the way that Pechter “makes love” to his employment

as a Shakespeare scholar, perhaps in a way that reminds us, however indirectly, of

Woolf’s own elevation of Shakespeare’s genius.

How exactly does Woolf anticipate this critical paradigm? Room predates

“The Intentional Fallacy,” but not in a merely chronological sense. Remember that,

in 1929, women did not hold English or literature appointments in universities;

indeed, the University of Cambridge, where Woolf delivered her lectures in 1928,

did not even grant full degrees to female graduates (Spurgeon and Bradbrook

were later among them). Woolf was, at any rate, not university educated, but she

moved in elite Cambridge-educated circles in Bloomsbury, and she wrote literary

and social criticism in published volumes which she styled “Common Readers.”

300 Cary DiPietro

If her Shakespeare seems old-fashioned, quaintly nineteenth-century in 1928,

this may have been her deliberate strategy, flouting what were to her exclusively

male modes of professional discourse in favor of a more familiar, more colloquial

“common” style.

Indeed, what we see Woolf doing in the essay is exploiting the tension between

the popular, romantic narrative of Shakespeare’s creative authorship and an early

professional criticism to her own end. In one moment, she problematizes the

universality of literary expression and genius to argue that such idealizations of

authorship have been, historically, male, while, in another moment, she flouts the

emergent discourse of professional criticism by writing with irony and indirection a

“camouflage” that Bradbrook would later criticize—not without some irony, in the

very first volume of Scrutiny (38). Woolf provides a genealogy of female literary

authorship that gives emphasis to the material conditions that enable writers to write

and that determine the ways that they write, all in a way that would seem to anticipate

later feminist and materialist criticisms. At the same time, she invests in an esoteric

female genius by flouting an academic style and appealing to a “common” reader.

This is what I find truly remarkable about Woolf’s writing, the way that she is

able to mobilize a version of Shakespeare to serve her political ends, even while she

remains invested in literature as a unique mode of writing, a product of genius that,

when it works well, appears to transcend the material conditions of circumstance.

The immaterial and material aspects of literary writing are not mutually exclusive

interests, but codependent preconditions for the production of great literature—and,

one assumes by extension, the understanding or appreciation of it. Woolf’s case thus

raises questions for our discussion here: have we abandoned the idea that literary

expression requires a special kind of talent or insight, call it genius if you wish, that

is finally reducible to a single originating source in the author? Is there more fluidity

between genres of writing than we generally allow, and is it, therefore, possible to

speak, in some qualified way, of dramatists as authors of fictions with intentions? Is

it imperative for us as literary scholars and students, if not to speculate on the nature

of Shakespeare’s authorship as Woolf does in Room, then, perhaps, to question the

value or necessity, as Pechter does, of aesthetic pleasure as a precondition for the

study of literature? Is it possible or desirable to recuperate such value-laden and

inescapably political assumptions about genius and literary expression, upon which

the professional criticism of literature was founded, and which remain embedded

in our more popular encounters with canonical works of literature?

This intersection between scholarly inquiry and the wider reception of

Shakespeare beyond the discourses of professional criticism also provides the


impetus for this particular special issue of Style. The issue began as a collaboration

between Style and SHAKSPER, the Global Electronic Shakespeare Conference.

SHAKSPER is an email list begun in the early 1990s to serve as an electronic

discussion group and was principally intended for university educators and scholars.

The list has been edited and moderated since 1993 by the assiduous Hardy Cook,

whose industriousness and commitment are truly remarkable not least because the

list has grown from an initially small and primarily scholarly audience to include

theatre practitioners, writers, independent scholars, and hobbyists. There are

currently over one thousand list members from more than sixty countries and the

range of discussion this diversity produces is remarkable, as well as occasionally

frustrating. SHAKSPER is a first stop for many scholars seeking to circulate calls for

papers or to advertise employment opportunities in their university departments, but

the conversation is often dominated by those outside the discipline and, as a result,

some would argue that the critical quality of the conversation subsequently suffers.

Cook has had to ban discussions of Shakespeare’s authorship outright—Oxfordians

are to an electronic Shakespeare discussion group what spam is to email—and is

sometimes required to intervene in interminably long threads, for example about

particular characters such as Hamlet or Iago and their motivations.

Perhaps because SHAKSPER serves as a meeting place for professionals and

enthusiasts alike, running discussions about authorial intention are not uncommon.

It was a long-running and particularly thought-provoking thread in 2007 that

led to a special “Roundtable” discussion in 2008. This was the first stage of the

collaboration with Style. The Roundtable format is a special feature of SHAKSPER

which, as envisioned by Cook, serves “to provide a forum for members to use the

Internet in such a manner as to enable academic discourse in an alternative platform

to conferences, journals, and such,” and which is meant to provide a more formal

level of discussion than that of the ordinary list (SHAKSPER 9 Dec. 2006). While

contributors are expected to be knowledgeable on the topic being discussed and to

engage with contemporary scholarship, the discussion is not restricted to professional

scholars. The Roundtable on “Shakespeare’s Intentions” was the second Roundtable

to appear on SHAKSPER following one on “Presentism” guest-moderated by

Hugh Grady in 2006.

The Internet fosters diversity and plurality, and arguably provides a more

democratized medium than that of traditional scholarly venues, in the case of

SHAKSPER, creating a dialogue between scholarly and broader discourse

communities. The Internet is generally global, though participation on SHAKSPER

is restricted to those fluent in English and is usually dominated by Anglo-American

302 Cary DiPietro

perspectives. Perhaps most importantly, the electronic medium of SHAKSPER

fosters, at least in principle, a critical awareness of the diverse activities and

attitudes that shape not just our understanding of Shakespeare’s works and his

authorship, but our assumptions about Shakespeare’s place in our shared and

distinct cultures and societies, and the priorities that are assigned to his writing by

markedly different groups.

In addressing critical reading and literacy in the age of the Internet, Gina Cervetti,

Michael Pardales, and James Damico argue that the foundation of a liberal-humanist

critical reading practice rests on epistemological and ontological assumptions that

include authorial intention: that knowledge is gained through a process of sense

making, deduction and rational analysis; that reality is directly knowable and can

serve as a referent for interpretation; and that detecting the author’s knowable

intentions has traditionally been the basis for higher levels of interpretation across

numerous disciplines. In place of what they identify as a set of humanist reading

practices, they offer a model of “critical literacy”: “In essence, students of critical

literacy approach textual meaning making as a process of construction, not exegesis;

one imbues a text with meaning rather than extracting meaning from it. More

importantly, textual meaning is understood in the context of social, historic, and

power relations, not solely as the product or intention of an author.” They argue

further, borrowing from mostly Frankfurt school critical theory, that “meanings are

always contested (never givens), and are related to ongoing struggles in society for

the possession of knowledge, power, status, and material resources.”

These arguments should be familiar to us, and are perhaps even simplistic

for our purposes. When they claim, for example, that “meanings emerge only in

relation to other meanings and practices within specific sociopolitical contexts,” and

that “authors create texts and individuals interpret them within discursive systems

that regulate what it means to know in a particular setting,” they invoke what are

to us axiomatic principles about interpretive communities. But their appearance

in reading and literacy research offers an astonishing point of comparison; they

isolate authorial intention at the centre of the liberal-humanist tradition and attempt

to decenter it when they argue for a different kind of reading whose goal is the

development of a critical consciousness, a consciousness of power, social justice,

and “differences across race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and so on.” As the

essays that follow evidence, discussions of authorial intention do not necessarily

erase or obviate such differences, but they do raise questions about the professional

context of our employment as teachers and scholars of literature, and about the

contestable power relations of scholarly discourse in an age of widening access

enabled by electronic communication and the Internet.


The following debate as it appears here in the comfortably hermetic pages of

Style has been fully translated into our professional academic idiom, but it began

as a series of near-daily exchanges in the more public medium of SHAKSPER.

Debates about authorial intention recur and will continue to do so on SHAKSPER

because of the interaction between professional and more public interpretive

communities. Such debates are motivated by the conflict between a popular

investment in Shakespeare’s works and the public, universal values and ideas they

are seen to represent—again, we find Woolf staking her claim both within and

against this kind of reading—versus a professional orthodoxy that values critical

detachment and disinterested objectivity. The essays that follow are concerned

with the debates within and between literary critical disciplines, but their point

of origin on SHAKSPER should remind us of the global politics of knowledge

production and ownership in the age of the Internet. One need look no further

than the talk and discussion pages of Wikipedia, whose articles are often a first

stop for undergraduate essay writers, to see such politics played out. And yet,

what this collaboration with Style also represents, with others of its kind, are new

models of producing and disseminating literary knowledge. This may sound like

a grandiose claim: the issue is, after all, a collection of scholarly essays on a very

familiar topic. Understood as an evolving conversation, though, the essays show us

what happens when groups of people from very different starting-points and very

different epistemological assumptions come together to debate (and not to resolve

or agree upon) their differences.

Since the essays evolved from an ongoing conversation, they are dialogic in

nature. They are grouped thematically in this issue and do not reflect the chronological

order in which they were written or first appeared on SHAKSPER. Indeed, most of

the essays have been revised several times and many of the authors reference, and

in some cases, quote earlier versions of the other essays that appear here. These

temporal inconsistencies remain here to remind us of the dynamic and incomplete

nature of the conversation.

The first three essays, by David Schalkwyk, Duncan Salkeld, and Peter

Rabinowitz, engage most directly with the philosophical question of intention, and

each falls by degrees on either side of the intentionalist/anti-intentionalist divide.

The essay by Rabinowitz is the most temporally removed of the essays herein; all

of the other contributors to the issue participated in some capacity in the original

SHAKSPER Roundtable, but Rabinowitz was invited well after the fact to bring

his perspective to bear on the discussion. The original hope expressed by John V.

Knapp, editor of Style, was that the collaboration with SHAKSPER would offer

304 Cary DiPietro

an opportunity for interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary dialogue—between

Shakespeare/drama studies and narrative studies. We were delighted that Rabinowitz,

author of such familiar works in narrative studies as Before Reading (1987) and,

with Michael W. Smith, Authorizing Readers (1997), among numerous other essays

and volumes, agreed, as he puts it, to navigate unfamiliar waters. Rabinowitz’s

essay provides an overview of the entire Roundtable from a narrative studies

perspective, and he expresses a position in which readers of Style may find much

common ground. But his distance from the original conversation combined with

his disciplinary proximity to readers of Style problematically privileges his voice

as a “respondent” to the discussion.

In his essay, Rabinowitz himself reflects upon the nature of interdisciplinary

dialogue that we have endeavoured to do—and, by implication, makes the argument

that what we’ve brought together here does in fact represent discrete disciplines with

very different philosophical traditions and assumptions—noting the many issues

that rarely attract the attention of narrative specialists, even while he is “perplexed

by the techniques and principles that are standard” in narrative studies “but that

don’t seem to influence the essays here, even when they might be helpful” (345).

Indeed, the ocean that separates us seems at times unnavigable. To help mitigate

this distance, John V. Knapp and I compiled a preliminary reading list for the

Roundtable that included representative works from both Shakespeare and narrative

studies, including the essays mentioned above by De Grazia and Stallybrass, and

Pechter, as well as chapters and articles by Rabinowitz—the opening chapter of

Before Reading contains a discussion of authorial intention not dissimilar to that

presented in the essay here—James Phelan and Brian Richardson, among others. I

hoped, in particular, that participants in the Roundtable would take up the argument

by Manfred Jahn in an article on narrative voice and agency in drama because he

uses a Shakespeare example.

Admirably, Jahn attempts to craft what he calls a narratology of drama. He

begins from a familiar point of departure, the speech-act theory of J. L. Austin and

his now notorious description of performative utterances in dramatic contexts as

“in a peculiar way hollow” (Austin 22). Moving through Searle’s and Genette’s

responses to Austin, Jahn argues that speech-act theory “flattens the communicative

structure of fictional texts to a single-level contact between reader and author” (668)

which necessarily excludes performance from a privileged regime of text. Drawing

upon the work of his contemporaries interested in narrative and performance, Jahn

argues against the familiar division between diegetic and mimetic narratives, and

he collapses that distinction by considering different kinds of narratorial voice in


drama: one we find in performance when characters “tell” the audience about events

(prologues and epilogues are exemplary instances of such dramatic narrators); the

other kind is provided by the combination of stage directions (and, one assumes,

speech prefixes, scene divisions, and so on) that are part of the text but are not

voiced in performance. These, argues Jahn, provide a coherent voice which tells us

how to imagine the scene and characters, and, though we might be tempted to hear

in them the voice of an author giving instructions to actors and not us, that voice is

nevertheless not dissimilar to a diegetic third-person narrator. The one example he

uses holds no surprises: George Bernard Shaw’s plays typically include elaborate

stage directions, often impossible to realize on stage or convey in performance, and

which are occasionally punctuated by personal pronouns. So far, so good, though

we might note at this point that many of Shaw’s plays were published well before

they were performed, some of them with little hope of being performed before

Shaw found relative success.

Speech-act theory is not unfamiliar ground to many Shakespeareans; in this

issue, both Schalkwyk and Salkeld discuss Searle, and in a recent and very influential

book, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance, W. B. Worthen repositions

Judith Butler’s critique of Austin and Derrida to similar effect by “rethinking the

function of writing in performance” (9). Following Butler, Worthen argues that

theatre is a “citational” practice that, rather than citing the dramatic text in a repetitive

or hollow way, instead reiterates “regimes of performance” (9): “Plays become

meaningful in the theatre through the disciplined application of conventionalized

practices—acting, directing, scenography—that transform writing into something

with performative force: performance behaviour” (10):

Regarding dramatic performance as having force means, paradoxically enough, that we must relinquish the notion that its force derives solely from the authorial text . . . To see dramatic performativity as a species of the “performative”—producing action with a char-acteristic, if ambiguous, force—we must fashion a much more dynamic understanding of the use and function of texts in the theatre . . . (Worthen 10)

Worthen’s argument is clearly germane to our discussion of authorial intention in

dramatic contexts, and we could readily map points of contiguity between not only

his and Jahn’s theory, but the rhetorical narrative theory described by Rabinowitz

in this issue, with its emphasis on the social context of utterance, and its distinction

between different kinds of audiences, authorial and actual.

But to return to Jahn’s argument, after laying out his theoretical position, he

instantiates his argument by discussing Pericles. This is an apocryphal play. Although

a quarto appeared in 1608 with an ascription to Shakespeare, the play was not

306 Cary DiPietro

included in the 1623 Folio, perhaps because it was a collaborative play or perhaps

because it was an earlier play merely revised or touched up by Shakespeare. The

1608 Quarto is itself of a very poor quality, and may be a pirated text composed

by memorial reconstruction (one or two actors recalling the play for a printer from

memory and invariably recalling their own parts better than others).5 The text that

Jahn discusses appears in the 1987 Oxford Complete Works, and it is by admission

of the editors both probably collaborative (co-authored with George Wilkins) as

well as reconstructed by the editors.6 Wilkins published a novel in 1608 called The

Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre, and the Oxford’s reconstructed text

“draws more heavily than is usual on Wilkins’s novel, especially in the first nine

scenes (which he probably wrote)” (1037). The inclusion of Pericles in the Oxford

Complete Works is only one of a series of what were at the time unconventional

choices made by the general editors to challenge the boundaries of Shakespeare’s

authorship and canon. This is the edition of the two-text King Lear, for example.

Jahn’s principal example of a dramatic narrator is the character Gower who

acts as a choric “presenter” and opens the play with a long prologue. The speech

derives from the dramatic Quarto text and appears in the Oxford with minimal

editorial emendation, though it also appears in a prose narrative form in Wilkins’s

novel version of the same period, raising questions about how or whether these

two versions inform one another. While the relationship between the dramatic and

prose narrative texts might be deployed to strengthen Jahn’s argument, it seems

somehow circumspect to talk about the narrative nature of the play and not to

mention the play’s particular textual genealogy, its proximity to a narrative version

by the same author.

If Gower provides a relatively stable and coherent narratorial voice within

the drama, such is less true for the stage directions. Stage directions in printed

plays of this period are both cursory and inconsistent on a number of levels: there

are few conventions that govern how characters are called onto the stage (that is,

sometimes by character name or some abbreviation of it, sometimes by title, such

as “Queen,” or even by the name of the actor intended to play the role); directions

are commonly missing, so that a character will suddenly be required to speak in a

scene even though he or she has not been brought on stage, or, conversely, will be

brought on the stage for some forgotten purpose; stage directions are, depending on

the process of transmission from manuscript to printed text, subject to any number

of non-authorial interventions, by scribal editors, actors, printing-house compositors,

and so on; the list goes on. Most modern editors attempt to normalize stage directions

(see John Drakakis’s discussion of stage directions and speech prefixes in Much


Ado About Nothing) according to some principle of editorial consistency, but this

requires a considerable degree of invention, even if the principle is one of economy,

as it usually is in most contemporary editions (Dover Wilson’s New Cambridge

series in the early twentieth-century is an important exception to this rule).

So, in the case of the Oxford Pericles, somewhere in the region of about half

of the stage directions are actually modern interpolations or have undergone some

degree of emendation, and many of these dramatically alter the diegetic level of

the narrative (for example, indicating that a character delivers a speech “aside”).

This, combined with the argument that the play is either or both collaborative and

memorially reconstructed means that the “narratorial voice” of the stage directions

in the printed text is complexly multivocal in ways that are quite impossible to

disentangle. This is not inconsistent with Jahn’s argument about the complex

communicative structure of the dramatic text. But when Rabinowitz in his essay notes

that narrative theory offers few tools to deal with “multiple creative responsibilities”

(343) such as we find in Pericles, he may as well be speaking of Jahn’s theory. For

a Shakespeare scholar, it would be inconceivable to theorize Shakespeare’s plays as

narratives and not to take on all at once the complexities of early modern dramatic

authorship, textual transmission, editorial practice, and the dramatic nature of the

script as both a historical record of theatrical practice and a set of instructions for

future performance.

I offer this example as merely one instance of the difficulties that beset this kind

of cross-disciplinary exchange in order to balance against the perspective brought by

Rabinowitz, as a narrative specialist, to the same set of difficulties. The four essays

that follow Rabinowitz’s do a very good job of unpacking those complexities of

editorial practice and theatrical performance I describe above. The essays by John

Drakakis and Gabriel Egan consider how or to what degree the dramatic author’s

intentions can serve as a principle for editorial practice. In the two subsequent

essays, both Alan Dessen and Cary Mazer amplify the difficulties that surround our

discussion by reminding us of the relationship between Shakespeare’s unstable texts

and the collaborative process of performance, both in Shakespeare’s time (Dessen)

and in subsequent performances (Mazer). The issue is rounded out by my co-editor,

Hardy Cook, who brings his perspective as owner and moderator of SHAKSPER

to the evolution of the Roundtable format and the role of our discussion in it.

Given the manner in which the essays that follow have evolved, they reference

not only one another, but the earlier discussion that took place on the Roundtable.

For those who are interested to see how this conversation unfolded, I encourage

you to refer to the Roundtable in the SHAKSPER archives, as well as to the earlier

308 Cary DiPietro

2007 thread, “Authorial Intention” (see Works Cited below). There are many voices

that have been silenced in the move to Style, but whose echoes can still be heard

in the way that the following essays have been shaped and focused. As much is

owed to the reading community and the energetic discussants of SHAKSPER as

is owed to the individual contributors to this issue. A special thanks must also go

to both Hardy Cook, for his unwavering commitment to SHAKSPER, and John V.

Knapp, for providing an opportunity to collaborate with us, having the patience to

see the collaboration through its stages to completion, and whose presence on the

sidelines of this ongoing project has been indispensable.

Notes1 “Author” is linked to its cognate “authority” by the Latin root in auctor and

auctoritas, both finding their modern English spellings in the late fourteenth, early fifteenth centuries (OED).

2 In the Sewanee Review, and later reproduced in The Verbal Icon. Quotations made here are to the later essay included in the full volume, which is more commonly quoted.

3 Consider, in particular, Woolf’s essay “Anon”; reproduced in “‘Anon’ and ‘The Reader’: Virginia Woolf’s Last Essays,” ed. Brenda R. Silver. Twentieth Century Literature, 25/5: 356-441.

4 See, for example, Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983) and The Function of Criticism (London: Verso, 1984); Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848-1932 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983); and Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987). These are a few among many works on this topic.

5 The arguments for and against memorial reconstruction are reviewed by MacDonald P. Jackson in Defining Shakespeare: Pericles as Test Case (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003).

6 Shakespeare’s collaborations with other writers in this and other plays are widely discussed and by no means settled issues. See, for example, the Introduction to the New Cambridge edition of Pericles, whose editors dismiss the argument of collaboration as a distracting “non-textual side issue” (15).

Works CitedArnold, Matthew. Essays by Matthew Arnold. London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford

UP, 1914. Print.


Austin, J. L. How To Do Things With Words. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1975.

Print.

Bradbrook, Muriel. “Notes on the Style of Mrs Woolf.” Scrutiny 1 (1932/3): 33-8.

Print.

Cervetti, Gina, Michael J. Pardales, and James S. Damico. “A Tale of Differences:

Comparing the Traditions, Perspectives, and Educational Goals of Critical

Reading and Critical Literacy.” Reading Online 4.9 (2001). Web. 17 July

2008. <http://www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp?HREF=/articles/

cervetti/index.html>.

Cook, Hardy M. (ed.). “Authorial Intention.” Online posting. 5 Mar. 2001 to 2 Apr.

2001. SHAKSPER: The Global Electronic Shakespeare Conference. Web. 21

April 2008. <http://www.shaksper.net/archives/2001/0525.html>

——. “Authorial Intention.” Online posting. 7 Sept. 2007 to 17 Oct. 2007.

SHAKSPER: The Global Electronic Shakespeare Conference. Web. 21 April

2008. <http://www.shaksper.net/archives/2007/0576.html>

——. “SHAKSPER Roundtable Revisited.” Online posting. 9 Dec. 2006.

SHAKSPER: The Global Electronic Shakespeare Conference. Web. 21 April

2008. <http://www.shaksper.net/archives/2006/1089.html>

De Grazia, Margreta, and Peter Stallybrass. “The Materiality of the Shakespearean

Text.” Shakespeare Quarterly 44.3 (1993): 255–83. Print.

Jahn, Manfred. “Narrative Voice and Agency in Drama: Aspects of a Narratology

of Drama.” New Literary History 32 (2001): 659-79. Print.

Pechter, Edward. “Making Love to our Employment; or, the Immateriality of

Arguments about the Materiality of the Shakespearean Text.” Textual Practice

11.1 (1997): 51–67. Print.

Shakespeare, William. Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Eds. Doreen Delvecchio and Anthony

Hammond. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print.

Wimsatt, William K., and Monroe C. Beardsley. “The Intentional Fallacy.” Sewanee

Review 54 (1946): 468-488. Revised and republished in The Verbal Icon: Studies

in the Meaning of Poetry. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1954. 3-18. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Penguin Books, 1929, reprinted

2004. Print.

310 Cary DiPietro

——. “‘Anon’ and ‘The Reader’: Virginia Woolf’s Last Essays.” Ed. Brenda R.

Silver. Twentieth Century Literature 25.5 (1979): 356-441. Print.

Worthen, W. B. Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance. Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 1997. Print.

——. Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge

UP, 2003. Print.

Documents

CDiPietro Introduction Shakespeares Intentions