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This essay, which followed quite closely upon my publication of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus: a 1604-version edition (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1991), was delivered as an invited paper at the Waterloo Conference on Elizabethan Theatre in July, 1993. After long delays, it was published in Elizabethan Theatre XV, edited by A. Lynne Magnusson and C. E. McGee (Toronto: P. D. Meany, 2002), pp. 128-54.
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1
[This essay, which followed quite closely upon my publication of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus: a 1604-version edition (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1991), was delivered as an invited paper at the Waterloo Conference on Elizabethan Theatre in July, 1993. After long delays, it was published in Elizabethan Theatre XV, edited by A. Lynne Magnusson and C. E. McGee (Toronto: P. D. Meany, 2002), pp. 128-54.]
[Index: textual criticism, literary theory, Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare][Date: 2002]
Text, Apparatus, History
Michael Keefer
1. Collaborating on/with the Real Shakespeare
One of the oddest pieces of Shakespearean commentary
written during the past century is an extended dialogue by one
William Bliss, published in 1947, which contains on its first page an
urbane denunciation of Shakespearean commentators as “the
ultimate nadir of human foolishness” (Bliss 3). If in this regard the
book invites description as a self-subverting artifact, in other
respects as well it is a thoroughly paradoxical performance. Yorick
and Eugenius, the partners in this dialogue, are loud in their
insistence that Shakespeare is best taken unmediated—or at least
without the glosses of scholars “who, like cuttle-fish, obscure him
with their sepia emanations” (4), and without the explanations of
2
interpreters like John Dover Wilson, whose method in What Happens
in ‘Hamlet’ is compared to that of “the man who blindfolded himself
and went searching in a dark cupboard for a black cat that wasn’t
there” (233).
Over helpings of bread, beer and stilton, vintage port and fine
cigars, Yorick and Eugenius affiliate themselves rather with “the best
critics—the real critics,” whose emphasis on taste also provides them
with an argument against those textual ‘disintegrators’ who in every
scene or passage which they thought to be flawed saw the hand of a
lesser playwright with whom Shakespeare must have collaborated. As
Eugenius says, “It’s like bad claret or bad sherry. Claret may be bad
and sherry may be bad, but even bad claret must be claret and bad
sherry is still sherry” (159). Yet despite their insistence on the whole
Shakespeare and nothing but Shakespeare, Eugenius and Yorick are
themselves (with readily discernible motives) playing the old game of
interpretive appropriation—and in what emerges as the book’s central
trope of self-legitimation, they witness and collaborate in a fully
authorized extension of the Shakespeare canon.
The book which I have been describing is entitled The Real
Shakespeare—an echo, no doubt, of Dover Wilson’s The Essential
Shakespeare (which by 1947 was in its eighth printing)—and to a
greater extent even than Dover Wilson, Yorick and Eugenius are
nosing after the real, the essential, the indispensable Shakespeare.
But being themselves “real critics,” they actually find him—or rather,
after ever stronger hints that an invisible presence has been
appreciatively eavesdropping on their conversations, Shakespeare
discloses himself, materializing in the final chapter to drink a glass of
wine with them. This Real Shakespeare, in a gesture of approval, gives
Yorick his signature as an Imprimatur (it is duly reproduced on the
page facing the table of contents). And as an answer to Eugenius’
mention of Matthew Arnold’s “Others abide our question, Thou art
3
free,” he composes a sonnet, which ends: “I have not grudged my
store, / But with both hands have poured for them my wine. / They
who love wine will drink and ask no more. / Secretum meum mihi, for
the rest: / I keep my Self locked up in my own breast” (303).
In these lines from what I suppose we should call Sonnet 155,
the Real Shakespeare offers himself as an exemplary instance of
autonomous subjectivity. He also legitimizes an interpretive criterion
of “taste” in words whose sacramental overtones confirm Michael
Bristol’s identification of “Shakespeare,” that “ghostly entity” who is
the benign “love-object of traditional humanist scholarship,” as “the
name of a tutelary deity or cult-object” (Bristol 19).
At this point, several paradoxes become evident. Although this
book seeks, and finds, a Shakespeare who is the sole and undivided
author of his Works, it represents the process of its own composition
as a dialogical and fully collaborative one. And while identifying
Shakespeare with his Works, and with a transcendental subjectivity
bound neither by history nor by materiality, it nonetheless
acknowledges its own immersion in both (in relation, for example, to
its purported completion “in mid-May of 1940, at the moment when
Norway was being swallowed up and just before France was over-run
by the German armies,” and to the wartime paper shortage which
delayed its publication until seven years later [ix-x]).1 But more
importantly, from my perspective, this Real Shakespeare with his
signature and supernumerary sonnet illustrates what I take to be an
inescapable feature of the textual condition—namely, that
authenticity, whether interpretive or textual, is a function of
supplementarity.
This is at once the central joke and the legitimizing trope of
Bliss's book. His seriously held opinions—for example, that “just as
1 This same paper shortage did not prevent Dover Wilson's The Essential Shakespeare from being reprinted four times during this period—in 1942, 1943, 1945, and 1946.
4
Theobald and Malone are responsible for the swarm of subsequent
annotators and conjecturers ... who made [Eugenius’] school-life a
burden..., so are Schlegel and Coleridge responsible for the half-
idolatrous, half-analytical school of modern Shakespearean criticism
which,” says Yorick, “has darkened my later life” (63)—these opinions
are made to rest upon a jocular fiction reminiscent of the larger-scale
forgeries of William Henry Ireland, that indefatigable ‘discoverer’ of
Shakespearean signatures and texts who was only exposed by the still
more indefatigable Edmond Malone. Ironically enough, in one respect
at least Bliss is closer than he realizes to the great eighteenth-century
editor who, like him, was anxious to preserve Shakespeare’s writings
“pure and unpolluted by any modern sophistication or foreign
admixture whatsoever” (Malone 2). But the dialogue form by means of
which Bliss advances as Shakespearean the modern (or at least
twentieth-century) opinions of Quiller-Couch and Sir John Squires is
hardly unsophisticated; and there is perhaps a “foreign admixture” to
the sonnet fathered on Shakespeare, which in its turns of phrase owes
more to Fitzgerald’s orientalizing Rubáiyát than to the Sonnets of
1609. Yet if sophistications and admixtures stand between the reader
and the Real Thing, they are also, as this case appears to suggest, the
only means by which its authenticity can be certified.
2. Authenticity, supplementarity, origins
The example with which I have begun is perhaps a slightly
eccentric way of arriving at a textual-critical paradox that Margreta de
Grazia’s intriguing study of what she calls “the reproduction of
authenticity” in Malone’s 1790 edition of Shakespeare has recently
brought to prominence. As she remarks in a brief but illuminating
analysis of the First Folio of 1623, the preliminary items in this text
5
“represent the different activities involved in the production and
promotion of the book”; they
are organized to publicize the functions on which
the Folio depends: publishing, patronage,
purchase, performance, and acclaim. As
Shakespeare’s authorship is acknowledged by the
title-page and throughout the preliminaries, so too
additional activities contributing to the making of
the volume are acknowledged in the dedication,
address, catalogue of plays, list of actors, and
panegyrics. (De Grazia 21-22)
However, in editions of the era inaugurated by Malone there remains
no trace of the text’s implication in this social network of contributary
functions. The Folio's preliminaries are replaced by a textual
apparatus, which as de Grazia points out, in reproducing a text, “in
making it again available and accessible,” also “dictates the terms of
its reception.” Despite its appearance of being merely ancillary, the
textual apparatus in fact specifies the text’s identity and the means by
which that is to be known (functioning ideologically, in this regard,
“like an Althusserian state apparatus that shapes and positions
subjects”); and at the same time it “predisposes the reader to specific
modes of reading and understanding. Its bracketing preliminaries and
appendices and its interpenetrating notes encode the rules by which
the content is to be valued and understood” (De Grazia 10-12).
What, in view of this interpellation of the text by its apparatus,
does it mean to claim, as I have done, that authenticity is a function of
supplementarity? It means, first, that the notions of textuality and the
protocols of interpretation which we may be inclined to accept as
natural are to be understood rather as historically conditioned
concomitants of a particular social imaginary (the shape of which is at
least implicit in the structures of the apparatus). It means also that
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authenticity, though apparently a primary term, or an effect of
precedence, is actually secondary, and an institutional construction.
Although the following definition of “authentic,” cited in the Oxford
English Dictionary from a text printed in the 1840s, is close to the
word's etymological sense, it would now I think be accepted only
among religious fundamentalists: “That is called authentic, which is
sufficient to itself, which commands, sustains, proves itself, and hath
credit and authority from itself.”
In the usage of contemporary textual critics, authenticity still
implies temporal or originary primacy, as well as authorial presence.
But none of these is self-evident; they require demonstration,
elucidation, argument: in short (to slip into a Derridean French),
suppléance. Which is to say that that which establishes, glosses,
frames, introduces or comments upon a text is itself also text, and
works, in the double or duplicitous sense of the French verb suppléer,
at once to supplement and to supplant that which occasions it. What
this in turn means is that editorial work has some claim to be
regarded as a form of collaboration in the shaping of a text—and not
just in the shaping of its secondary or belated forms. For thanks to a
temporal doubling (and doubling back) that is inherent in the project
of editing, it is precisely as an intervention in the text’s originary
processes that a successful or ‘authoritative’' edition legitimizes its
claim to re-present to the contemporary reader the text’s authentic
form.
Let me speak from my own small experience with editorial work.
The 1604 quarto of Christopher Marlowe's Tragical History of Doctor
Faustus, a slim volume of six signatures, contains, on forty-three
printed pages (not counting the title page) a text some 1,500 lines in
length. My own 1991 edition, based on this version of the play, offers
a text that I would claim is demonstrably closer, both verbally and
structurally, to the play’s “originary textual moment” in the early
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1590s (as opposed to what Jerome McGann would call subsequent or
“secondary moments of textual production and reproduction”
[“Monks” 192-93]); this claim, if valid, generates the odd conclusion
that the text of a late twentieth-century edition is in certain respects
more authentic than that of the first quarto. But the play-text in this
edition, preceded by some ninety pages of introductory matter,
occupies ninety-two pages (with explanatory notes crawling in some
instances halfway up the page, and eleven-odd pages given over to
textual collations), and it is followed by four appendices (the first
reproducing scenes from another quite distinct early version of the
play), which together occupy a further one hundred and nineteen
pages.
Although this edition claims in something like the conventional
manner to be reproducing “Marlowe’s” play-text, what it presents is
actually, for these and other reasons, something new and different. Its
modern-spelling text effaces one delicate layer of meaning present in
the early quartos (though as Randall McLeod’s analyses of the
differences between old spelling and old typesetting make clear, a
similar charge could also be levelled at any old-spelling edition). More
significantly, the choices made from among the variants offered by the
two substantive versions of Doctor Faustus differ from those of any
other text or edition of the play, and two scenes are printed in a
sequence for which there is no precedent in the early quartos or in
previous editions.2 And finally, the critical and textual apparatus by
2 Such a degree of 'originality' may seem wanton. However, my re-ordering of displaced scenes was based upon an analysis (of a kind not previously attempted) of the differential relationships in the 1604 and 1616 texts between clowning scenes and the principal action (see Marlowe 1991: lxxii-lxxvii). The Revels Plays edition of Bevington and Rasmussen has since adopted the same re-ordering of the displaced scenes. It should perhaps be added that the arguments for ‘un-editing’ which make good sense with respect to other early modern texts falter before Doctor Faustus, both early versions of which contain discontinuities and lapses that make them effectively unactable as they stand. One may suspect that scholars who call for diplomatic editions of the two versions in preference to (not just in addition to) critical editions have themselves perhaps not made the effort of seriously—or playfully for that matter—reading the quarto texts.
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means of which I sought to reconstitute the context and early textual
history of the play and to legitimize my editorial decisions is itself
implicated in issues of contemporary cultural politics. Such at least is
the opinion of Leah Marcus, who describes this edition as having been
shaped “to recuperate Marlowe for the left” ("Recent" 399). (On one
level correct, this comment is on another more interesting level
evidence of what amounts to a substitution of political labelling for
critical thought—a matter to which I will return.)
What these differences and these indications of an engagement
at once with Elizabethan and with contemporary history, with the
text's originary context and with the edition's own context of
reception, add up to is obvious enough. The recursive movement by
which this or any other edition professes to return to a point near the
beginning of its text’s trajectory through history is simultaneously and
more distinctly an extension of that trajectory, a further removal of
the text-in-history from its originary moments of textual and dramatic
production and reproduction. But insofar as an edited text establishes
itself as canonical, has the editor not also inserted herself as a
collaborative presence into the text's originary processes?
3. Performative collaboration
As an example from the realm of performance may suggest, the
integrity of any recursive movement into the past is directly
dependent upon a concurrent recognition of this movement's
participation in the concerns of our own time.
In the spring of 1989, the government of Margaret Thatcher was
celebrating the tenth anniversary of its accession to power.
“Prosperity” (meaning the deindustrialization of a large part of Britain,
and a steady transfer of wealth from poor to rich) and “social peace”
9
(a euphemism for the crippling of the trade union movement and the
steady erosion of civil liberties) had been imposed upon the country.
In an address to the Assembly of the Church of Scotland Mrs. Thatcher
intimated that any remaining opponents of her political program were
attempting to sabotage an achievement for which she did not hesitate
to claim divine sanction. This is the context in which I attended two
quite different performances of Richard III in London. The first was
mounted by the Phoenix Theatre and the Renaissance actors’
company in lovingly rendered period costume, as the vehicle for a star
turn by Derek Jacobi; the second, a part of the sequence of history
plays directed for the English Shakespeare Company by Michael
Bogdanov, was a jangling postmodern discord of incompatible
costumes, sets and acting styles.
Yet it was the Phoenix production that seemed the more
thoroughly permeated by contemporary concerns, and I would claim
without hesitation that the Bogdanov production was the more
historically responsible of the two. As in his Henry IV, Part I, where a
punk Hotspur wore plate armour in the council and battle scenes,
occasionally with a khaki shirt draped over his shoulders, while
Worcester sported the buff coat of a Cromwellian trooper, Falstaff
dress scarlets, and the Douglas the battledress of a highland regiment
of 1914, the costumes in Bogdanov's Richard III effectively disrupted
any perception of the play as a museum artifact by insistently
reminding the audience of the different historical contexts, up to the
present, with which this play has interacted. The Jacobi Richard III
appeared, by comparison, oddly mummified—except in its closing
moments, when Richmond's concluding speech, proclaiming an end to
civil strife, modulates at last into prayer:
Abate the edge of Traitors, Gracious Lord...
Let them not liue to taste this Lands increase,
That would with Treason, wound this faire Lands peace.
10
Now Ciuill wounds are stopp'd, Peace liues agen;
That she may long liue heere, God say, Amen. (sig. t2v; V.
v. 35, 38-41)
Delivered in the Phoenix production by a Richmond who faced the
audience in full armour with his armoured followers kneeling in ranks
behind him, these lines seemed an electrifying (if slightly
exaggerated) anticipation of Mrs. Thatcher’s authoritarian piety: what
an audience might easily have taken for the voice of the Bard himself
resonated in an uncanny way with the proclamations of the Iron Lady.
The effect of proto-Thatcherite apologetic appears to have been
unintentional, the management of the Phoenix Theatre and the
Renaissance actors’ company having only days before made public
their contempt for Mrs. Thatcher's social and cultural policies. It was,
rather, an uncontrolled release of meaning generated by the
overlapping of two discourses, Shakespearean and contemporary,
which the unreflective archaism of the production seems to have
prevented the director from recognizing.
In contrast, Bogdanov’s expedient of having these same lines
delivered by a suit-and-tie Richmond whose announcement of
“Smooth-fac’d Peace” (sig. t2v; V.v.33) was mediated by a bank of
television monitors made explicit the contemporary generic category
of the speech: we were witnessing a performance by a very skilful
politician.
This partial translation—the stage images were those of
postmodern media politics, while the words remained those of a
Renaissance monarch—may have seemed laboured. But Bogdanov
deserves credit for having recognized that the play discharges its
energies into an atmosphere that is always already ideologically
charged, and that our receptions of it are unavoidably informed by
that context. His imposition on the play-text of a complex array of
disjunctive historical ironies imposed a parallel recognition upon the
11
audience both of its own historical distance from the originary context
of the play, and also of the layers of historical mediations through
which our experience of early modern play-texts is filtered.
A quite different kind of irony arose out of the Jacobi
production’s striving for period authenticity—for the last moments of
that production constituted a thoroughly present-day intervention, a
legitimation by the Bard of the new social and economic order which
during the run of that production was being celebrated by Mrs.
Thatcher’s supporters as the precarious achievement of her ten years
in office. This production, I would insist, was historically irresponsible—
not just because I happen to disapprove of the appropriation of
Richard III which it facilitated, but also, more importantly, because the
effect was accidental, uncontrolled, unintended: who, indeed, could be
regarded as answerable for it? But this kind of abdication of historical
responsibility—which amounts to neglecting the elementary fact that
we cannot be faithful to a play-text’s historicity if we have forgotten
our own—is as much a routine matter among textual critics as it is
among actors and directors.
4. An ideology of editorial authenticity
The notion of textual authenticity corresponds for most
purposes to a condition of belatedness. A text may in fact be of single,
mixed, or sedimented authorship; it may be pseudepigraphic or
forged. But only in the backward-looking perspective of a later age, in
which the myriad filaments linking earlier texts to their contexts of
originary production and reproduction have been severed or obscured,
does it become important to categorize a text as authentic or
inauthentic—to seek, in other words, as much of a reconstitution of
originary contexts as may be required for an assessment of the text's
12
early provenance. Such a project of reconstitution involves,
inescapably, an interweaving of those earlier contexts with one's own
—which is to say, with such factors as one’s gender, social class, and
race, one’s institutional and discursive situation, ideological
convictions and desires. This is also part of what it means to describe
textual authenticity as a function of supplementarity.
The understanding of editorial work that I have begun to outline
here goes counter to what has been until the past decade the
dominant metaphysic and master-narrative of textual criticism.3
Consider, for example, the work of Sir Walter Greg, of Fredson
Bowers, and of G. Thomas Tanselle, three of the most distinguished
textual-critical theorists and editorial practitioners of this century. An
oddly Neoplatonic note can be detected in the utterances of all three:
in, for example, Greg’s famous distinction between the “substantial”
and “accidental” features of a text (Greg 43), which might be taken to
imply a scholastic separation of the ‘essential thing’ from its
historically specific materiality. Bowers, taking up this distinction,
described the “accidentals” of a text as “the system of spelling,
punctuation, capitalization, and word-division that clothes the words,”
and spoke of the need “to strip the veil of print from a text by
analyzing the characteristics of identified compositors” (Bowers 167,
87; emphasis added). What is veiled in these metaphors is apparently
not the text's material ‘body,’ but rather a kind of trans-historical
essence. As the human soul is clothed by the body, so the immaterial
substantial text is veiled by its accidents; in each case the second,
inessential term is made to bear the burden of corporeality—and also,
it might seem, of historicity. Although an element of abstraction is
unavoidable in textual analysis, there are surely less metaphysically
3 This and the next several paragraphs expand an argument made in the introduction to my edition of Doctor Faustus (xvii-xviii).
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loaded ways of talking about the processes that give rise to textual
variants.
But Neoplatonic metaphors such as these appear to be no more
than offshoots of an implicit master-narrative that has arguably
shaped the empirical narratives of the last several generations of
textual critics. Tanselle’s account of what he calls “the immutable
condition of written statements” offers us a glimpse of this
Neoplatonic master-narrative. “[I]n writing down a message,” he says,
“one brings down an abstraction to the concrete, where it is an alien,
damaged here and there through the intractability of the physical”
(Rationale 64-65). His concluding assessment of the value of textual
criticism is equally revealing. Although literary works, those
“‘Monuments of unageing intellect’,” are subjected “in their passage
to us ... to the hazards of the physical,” these “flowerings of previous
human thought ... in their inhuman tranquillity have overcome the
torture of their birth.” Textual criticism, through study of the
constantly changing "containers" in which literary works are housed,
“helps us to see the process by which humanity attempts, sometimes
successfully, to step outside itself” (Rationale 93). Elsewhere, in a
manner which suggests that the work of the textual critic may itself be
an expression of this impulse to transcendence, Tanselle defines
historical scholarship as an attempt, “through an informed
imaginative effort, to escape into the thinking of another time, even
though one knows that the escape is never complete and that it will
have to be reattempted by others in the future” (Textual Criticism
134; emphasis added). His quotation from Yeats’s “Sailing to
Byzantium” was clearly not adventitious: in refusing to recognize the
present as history, and textual critical work as a form of historical
agency which is enmeshed with the present at the same time as it
engages with the past, Tanselle makes historical scholarship complicit
with a Yeatsian nostalgia for “the artifice of eternity” (Yeats 218).
14
Greg, Bowers and Tanselle are displacing into textual terms the
Neoplatonic story of the soul’s descent from an originary unity to a
state of materiality, multiplicity and error, and its purifying reascent to
the One. In terms of the genre with which we are concerned, the text
can be said to descend from its authorial originator into a confused
world of theatrical alterations, memorial corruption, censorship,
revision, copyist’s errors and compositorial alteration—the dark world,
in textual jargon, of the Bad Quarto4—from which it is to be led back to
a state of primordial unity by the ministrations of the editor.
Donald Pizer has in terms rather like these caricatured the view,
which he attributes to Greg and his successors, that “a text emerges
from its author’s imagination trailing clouds of glory. Then, shades of
the prison-house of unauthorized, ill-advised, and self-censored
change close down upon it.” The editor’s role in this quasi-religious
allegory is almost a priestly one: confronting the corrupt published
text, “he cleans it of its worldliness and restores it to its original
purity” (Pizer 147).
No one would quarrel with the project—as one among others—of
restoring a text to a state preceding the accretions or reinscriptions of
secondary moments of textual production and reproduction. But by
what criteria is that state to be determined? And how, except through
an institutionally conditioned and ideologically motivated blindness,
can a project of restoration ever escape its own nature as a
historically constrained intervention in the discourses both of its own
time and of the text's originary context? The Neoplatonic master-
narrative I have identified conflates the project of editorial restoration
with Romantic conceptions both of authorship and of the ministrations
of scholarship, thus obscuring what McGann calls “the dynamic social
relations which always exist in literary production—the dialectic
4 The notion of the "bad" quarto has recently come under severe criticism; see Urkowitz, Charney, Werstine, and McGuire.
15
between the historically located individual author and the historically
developing institutions of literary production” (Critique 81). To
acknowledge this dialectic is to recognize both the inescapably
collaborative nature of the text’s initial production, and also, I would
argue, the presence in its subsequent reshapings of what Jeffrey
Masten has spoken of as diachronic forms of collaboration (Masten
339).
Textual critics working with Elizabethan and Jacobean play-texts
have, until recently, presupposed an autonomous author whose
intentions were authoritatively expressed in the lost manuscript which
it has been their goal (within the limits of possibility) to reconstruct.
But as Stephen Orgel has remarked, theatrical companies often
commissioned a play, stipulated its subject, apportioned sections of
the plot to different playwrights, and then revised the resulting text—
from which it follows that “the very notion of ‘the author’s original
manuscript’ is in such cases a figment” (Orgel 84). If it no longer
makes sense to conceptualize the author-function as confined to a
single individual, to a noetic Unity conceived of as the sole origin of an
ideal textuality which on its descent to the physical or worldly plane
declines into multiplicity and error, by the same token the task of
analyzing the contributions of agents other than the author or authors
to the collaborative processes by which the text is shaped (I am
thinking of players, censors, printers and, most distinctly, editors,
subsequent as well as contemporaneous) acquires a certain urgency.
5. Metaphors of textual (re)production
However, before engaging with these different forms of
collaboration, and in particular with the diachronic collaboration
involved in editorial work, more needs to be said about the role of
16
metaphor in textual critical work. If textual-critical discourse is to be
separated from its previous commitments to a master-narrative which
occludes a wide range of social and historical factors, it seems all the
more important to recognize the extent to which apparently
commonsensical formulations can carry an unacknowledged
metaphysical and ideological weight. I would suggest, for example,
that to accept a convenient distinction between “literary work” and
“text” in the manner proposed by Tanselle is to succumb to the entire
metaphysic and master-narrative of the traditional textual critics.
However, some statements of an opposing view of textuality as
social and collaborative are also open to question. Anne Mette Hjort,
for example, has argued that one important consequence of moving
“from a reified view of the ‘work’ as the complete, perfect and
unmediated externalization of an inner intention, to a view of the work
in which its relations to different social and historical groups are
foregrounded” would be
a shift of emphasis from the author’s ‘work’ to
what Gadamer has called the ‘effective-history’ of
a work. All of the different scribal emendations, all
of the changes made by actors, all of the various
appropriations, become an integral and
unalienable part of the work’s meaning—for the
appropriations of a ‘work’ and any emendations
that these might involve only make manifest the
ways in which the work can combine with specific
intentional horizons to produce meaning. (Hjort
274)
But to the extent that emendations, changes and appropriations can
be separately identified, and to the extent that one can speak of the
“work” as distinct from the various subsequent “intentional horizons”
in conjunction with which its meaning is produced, the words “integral
17
and unalienable” seem inappropriate. In adopting a notion of meaning
as a presumably integral summation of all possible reinscriptions,
enactments and appropriations, is Hjort not re-entering Plato's
domain, if by the back door?
A similarly totalizing note may be audible in the following
statement by Jean Howard and Marion O'Connor, even though they
acknowledge meaning, understood historically, as plural rather than
singular, and conflictual rather than additive:
... every reading or staging of a play is implicated
in ideology in that it produces the play within the
codes and conventions sustaining particular,
interested constructions of the real. Far from
distorting the “true” meaning of an unchanging
text, however, such constructions are the text: it
lives in history, with history understood as a field
of contestation. (Howard and O'Connor 4)
Here a conflation of textual and theatrical modes of production (which
as Terry Eagleton suggests are incommensurable, though in certain
respects analogous [64]) is accompanied by a parallel conflation of
text and appropriation. I would want to admit that any use of a text
(whether in reading or in theatrical production) is also an
appropriation and, as such, transformative—and to admit as well that
only through such interactions can meaning be generated. But unless
it were possible to distinguish in some way between the various
material forms or versions assumed by a text and the acts of
appropriation responsible for its interpretive and textual
differentiation, how could we acknowledge the contributions of
censorship, of hostile amendment or subtractive reinscription, and of
editorial work to the processes of change? And how could we identify
the discursive currents or ideological formations implicated in these
processes?
18
Metaphors are available which make it possible at once to
acknowledge the discontinuities involved in successive receptions and
appropriations of a text, and also to recognize the common features
shared by such divergent or successive versions as Q1 and Q2 Hamlet
or the A and B texts of Doctor Faustus.
Text as palimpsest: this metaphor, foregrounding the potential
violence of acts of appropriation and reinscription, can remind us that
these are also acts of erasure and of substitution—but acts which the
resistant materiality of the text’s earlier states makes it possible to
trace, to identify, and even to reverse. The suggestion, clearly, is that
in its later states the text becomes a product of social and
collaborative processes. But what was it to begin with?
The metaphor of text as weave (exploiting the derivation of
“text” from the past participle of the Latin texere, “to weave”) permits
us to insist that social and institutional contexts (from contextus,
meaning “woven with”) must be understood, not as forming a
background in contradistinction to which the canonized text takes
centre stage, but rather as integral—though not unalienable—
constituents of the text in which they participate. Whether or not it is
subjected to material alterations in its passage through time, the text
is unavoidably de-contextualized (which is to say that certain of the
discursive elements which traverse it drop out of the weave); at the
same time, equally unavoidably, it is re-contextualized, with an
overlay or insertion of new discursive strands. These processes,
though ineluctable, are not unmotivated, and can therefore become
the object of analyses that are ideological as well as textual-critical in
inflection. I have studied Marlowe's Doctor Faustus in this vein (see
“Misreading,” “History”); John Barrell’s tracing of the erasure from
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 of an early modern discourse of patronage,
and its replacement by a post-Romantic one of autonomous
subjectivity, offers a more elegant example of this kind of work
19
(Barrell ch. 1). Although in these instances the issue of collaboration is
ignored, the metaphor can easily accommodate the possibility of a
textual weave constituted and reconstituted by a plurality of agencies.
I offer, with some diffidence, a third metaphor. Alan Sinfield has
recently proposed that at what he calls the “faultlines” in a text—
small fractures, discontinuities or slippages produced within it at
places where the social order’s “own criteria of plausibility fall into
contest and disarray”—“a dissident perspective may be discovered
and articulated” (Sinfield 45-46). Faultline stories, addressing such
“controversial aspects of our ideological formation” as class, race,
gender and sexual orientation, “are the ones that require most
assiduous and continuous reworking”; it follows that “The task for a
political criticism ... is to observe how stories negotiate the faultlines
that distress the prevailing conditions of plausibility” (47). Would an
extension of this geological metaphor perhaps allow one to speak not
just of faultlines (or for that matter of processes of textual
sedimentation), but also of larger tectonic movements of textual or
discursive fields in interaction over time, and hence of diachronic
textual change as well as of synchronic fissures within texts?
Analogies from plate tectonics are in several respects suggestive: I will
mention here only that the interactions of plates, with consequent
discontinuous releases of tension or pressures in such linked
phenomena as subduction and elevation, take place in response to
eddying circulations of the underlying magma.
6. Forms of Marlovian collaboration
But the problem may not be entirely or even primarily one of
textual-critical metaphorics; it may be more directly the result of what
Gary Taylor analyzes as a saturation of our “intertextual spaces” by
20
the institutionally isolated texts of Shakespeare (Taylor 130).
Advancing a claim for Thomas Middleton as “a great writer; greater
than Marlowe, Jonson, or Webster; as great as Shakespeare,” Taylor
asks: “How might our editorial paradigms—that is, our models of
intertextual space—be different, if they were founded on the evidence
of Middleton’s texts, rather than Shakespeare’s?” (133-34).
His answer is startling. The Middleton canon—or that, rather, of
“Middleton et al.”—would have obliged editors, critics, and theorists to
confront the fact of authorial revision; to acknowledge that the
survival of authorial manuscripts or of the promptbook of a play’s first
production does not resolve questions of textual authority; to dismiss
the binaries of folio and quarto, good and bad quarto, authorial foul
papers and theatrical promptbooks; to reject “the simplistic generic
divisions” imposed by Shakespeare’s First Folio, as well as the more
basic opposition between literary and non-literary texts; to recognize
“a collaborative model of textual production” as normal both at the
authorial level and that of printing houses; to admit the possibility
that a work need not be a complete work, nor an oeuvre a Complete
Works; to attend to the materiality of the text in relation to such
matters as Middleton’s evident concern with the semiotics of print and
with the marketing and reception of his writings; and finally to accept
that Middleton’s plays, written both for popular and for elite theatres,
tell us more about the relations between composition and dramatic
transmission than do Shakespeare’s, which emerge from an unusually
sustained connection of playwright with company (Taylor 134-39).
I would like to ask a similar question about what the early
textual history of Christopher Marlowe’s writings can tell us about the
nature of collaboration and collective invention in early modern
England—including, very distinctly, what Jeffrey Masten calls
diachronic forms of collaboration. Then, narrowing my focus to a
single play, Doctor Faustus, I want in conclusion to ask what some
21
representative recent interpretations of the evidence bearing on the
different versions of this play-text reveal about the present state of
Marlovian textual criticism.
As the first volume of Roma Gill’s new Oxford edition of Marlowe
very aptly reminds us, the most conspicuously authorial mode of
Marlovian collaboration is translation—a mode which develops from
the brilliant young scholar’s line for line renderings of Ovid’s Elegies
and Lucan’s First Book to the mocking dissidence of his treatment of
Vergil in Dido Queen of Carthage (which the title page of the quarto of
1594 informs us was written in collaboration with Thomas Nashe),5
and finally to the lapidary playfulness of Hero and Leander, a poem
which entirely displaces its classical archetype. If Marlowe can be said
to have ‘collaborated’ with Ovid, Lucan, Vergil and Musaeus in
variously re-presenting, subverting and supplanting their texts, there
is perhaps an appropriate irony to the manner in which his own
writings were absorbed into post-mortem collaborations by writers of
his own age.
The first of these are the ‘completions’ of Hero and Leander by
George Chapman and by Henry Petowe, both printed in 1598, which
attempt (one with a severe strength, the other feebly) to limit and
control the anarchic force of Marlowe's ironies. To these one might
perhaps add Nashe’s wonderfully burlesque retelling of the story in
Lenten Stuff, printed in the following year—or, fifteen years later, Ben
Jonson’s in Bartholomew Fair.
Paul Kocher proposed Thomas Nashe as author of the comic
prose scenes of Doctor Faustus—an attribution John D. Jump thought
seemed “unduly hard on a prose-writer who, whatever his faults, did
not lack liveliness” (Marlowe 1962: xlii).6 Eric Rasmussen’s analysis of
5 H. J. Oliver has argued, in opposition to the view of McKerrow (Nashe, vol. iv. 295), that Nashe did in fact collaborate in the composition of Dido; see Marlowe 1968: xxii-xxiv. 6 As so often in criticism of Doctor Faustus, this difference of opinion is complicated by the fact that Kocher was talking about the 1604 or A text of the play,
22
function-word frequencies makes it seem more likely that at least two
of these comic scenes (I. iv and IV. i) were the work of Marlowe’s
Cambridge contemporary Henry Porter (Rasmussen 71-73).
In these latter cases the assumption is that Marlowe and Porter
(or Nashe) worked together. A rather more contentious—and, once
again, diachronic—form of authorial collaboration is evident in the
revision of Doctor Faustus carried out in 1602 by William Birde and
Samuel Rowley. These writers were paid by Philip Henslowe “for ther
adicyones in doctor fostes” (Greg 11-12), but in fact recast and
reoriented the entire play in a manner that largely deprived it of its
dissident, interrogative force, and returned the legend to the
moralizing and repressive form which Marlowe had subverted (see
Marlowe 1991: xiii-xv). A similar, if less violent, revisionary
collaboration may underlie the only existing version of The Jew of
Malta: Thomas Heywood, who saw this play through the press in 1633
—a full four decades after Marlowe’s death—may have contributed
more to it than the dedicatory epistle and the prologues and epilogues
for court and public performance that are confessedly his. (But
comparison, alas, is impossible: no copy survives of the version
entered for publication in the Stationers’ Register in 1594.)
What then of playhouse collaboration? It might seem unlikely
that the poet who in the Prologue to 1 Tamburlaine expressed his
scorn for “iygging vaines of riming mother wits, / And such conceits as
clownage keepes in pay” (Marlowe 1941: 9)—that is, for the least
literary and most improvisatory form of dramatic performance current
on the Elizabethan stage, the jig—should have lent himself to
collaboration with actors, and comic actors at that. However, there is
reason to believe that one actor at least contributed in a quite
distinctive manner to the comic scenes of Doctor Faustus.
and Jump about the 1616 or B text.
23
Thomas Lodge’s and Robert Greene’s play A Looking-Glass for
London and England resonates with Doctor Faustus in a manner that
has long nagged at textual critics: the usurer’s speech of despair in A
Looking Glass resembles parts of Faustus’s final speech, and a piece
of comic business involving a clown’s fantasy of beating a devil to
death appears both in the 1604 quarto of Faustus and in A Looking
Glass (where the fantasy is very nearly actualized). The usual
approach to this intertextuality has been to argue that A Looking
Glass is the derivative text, and that the 1604 or A-version of Doctor
Faustus thus antedates that play’s first performance in 1591-92. The
usurer’s speech may well be an opportunistic imitation of Faustus, in
which case the comic business in A Looking Glass would also most
likely be derivative.7 But is there perhaps another alternative?
In an intriguing conjecture, Roma Gill has raised the possibility
that this comic routine originated, not in one play or the other, but
rather in the improvisatory repertoire of an actor who helped to shape
the slapstick routines in both plays—a clown of the kind that (in
Hamlet’s words) “keepes one sute Of ieasts, as a man is knowne by
one sute of Apparell” (Q1, III. ii. 33-35). In this case, Gill proposed, the
actor can be named. John Adams, who played with Sussex’s Men in
1576 and The Queen’s Men in 1583 and 1588, was well enough
remembered to be linked with the famous clown Richard Tarlton in the
Induction to Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614): “Adams, the rogue,
ha’leaped and capered upon him [Tarlton], and ha’dealt his vermin
about as though they had cost him nothing.” Gill’s suggestion that
during the 1590s Adams was one of the Admiral’s Men and dealt his
vermin about in Doctor Faustus I. iv. 21-29 is very appealing—as is her
supposition that, having acted the role of the Clown (also named
Adam) in A Looking Glass who beats and mortally wounds a devil, he
7 The suggestion made by Roma Gill in 1979 that there might have been two-way borrowing, with the comic business originating in A Looking Glass (Gill 61), does not seem plausible. Compare Kuriyama 182, Empson 187, and Rasmussen 11-12.
24
subsequently contributed the “kill-devil” jest to Doctor Faustus I. iv.
45-49 (Marlowe 1990: xix-xxi).8
If there is thus reason to suspect that actors collaborated in the
constitution of the play-texts which we know under the name of
Marlowe, one can also point to the much more plentiful evidence of
their participation in the transmission and in the writerly or memorial
reinscription of these texts. Roslyn Knutson’s study of the Elizabethan
repertory system has shown that its needs were in part responsible for
the shape taken by the 1602 revision of Doctor Faustus. And as I have
argued elsewhere, traces of memorial transmission can be detected in
both the 1604 and the 1616 versions of Doctor Faustus (Marlowe
1991: lxix)—while in the case of The Massacre at Paris, what we
possess is a text that seems entirely constituted by the work of
memory, to the extent that the textual body of its sole surviving
version, an undated octavo, seems scarcely less mangled than those
of the figures who, throughout the play, are shot, stabbed,
defenestrated and drowned.
Of equal importance is the evidence of printing-house
collaboration in the production of Marlowe’s texts. It would be most
interesting to know, in the case of Tamburlaine, what exactly were
those “fond and friuolous Iestures, digressing (and in my poore
opinion) far vnmeet for the matter,” which Richard Jones excised from
the text that he printed in 1590, lest they “prooue a great disgrace to
so honorable & stately a historie....” One might surmise that, like the
Calyphas episode in 2 Tamburlaine IV.i, these passages would have
undermined the totalitarian fantasy which the “honorable and stately”
text we possess seems, for the most part, to legitimize. There may, in
other words, be a connection between Jones's apparent approval of
“the Scythian Shepheard ... that became so great a Conqueror, and so
8 The possibility of collaboration in this scene by an actor complicates any attempt like Rasmussen's to establish authorship on the basis of comparative analysis of the function-word fingerprints of Marlowe, Henry Porter and others.
25
mightie a Monarque,” and his distinction between the “matter of
worth” which contributed to this image of Tamburlaine and those
“graced deformities” which—at the very least—must have deflected
an audience’s attention in other directions. Whatever the nature of the
deleted material,9 the Tamburlaine plays that London audiences knew
in the late 1580s contained a comic counterweight to tyranny which is
lacking in the printed text. Arguably, then, this printer’s politic
collaboration—which Marlowe, if he cared, had no means of resisting,
since the text was not his property—has had a decisive impact upon
all subsequent interpretations of these plays.
Jones’s intervention may have been “politic” in a second sense—
as designed in part to pre-empt the reaction of the ecclesiastical
censor by whom Tamburlaine the Great would have to be licensed
before it could be printed (see Clare 17). In the case of Doctor
Faustus, however, one can identify censorship which took place in the
playhouse rather than the printer's shop. This play was entered in the
Stationers’ Register by Thomas Bushell in January 1601, and the
earliest surviving edition was printed by him in 1604; in the mean
time, in 1602, the Admiral’s Men commissioned a revision of the play
and made it once more part of their repertory. Either at this time or in
1606, when the Act of Abuses imposed heavy fines for profane
references to God in stage plays, this version of Doctor Faustus (which
was eventually printed in 1616) was subjected to a systematic
censorship.
9 The common assumption of critics has been that Jones cut clowning "gags" which had been inserted by actors into the play-text. He was more probably editing out material developed in collaboration between playwright and actors. These “Iestures,” Jones writes, “might seeme more tedious vnto the wise, than any way els to be regarded, though (happly) they haue bene of some vaine conceited fondlings greatly gaped at, what times they were shewed vpon the stage in their graced deformities” (Marlowe 1941: 7). Much the same could no doubt have been said of the sardonic ironies of Marlowe's other plays. I am tempted to think that there may be an ironic echo (a clearly authorial one) of Jones’s words in the contrast between “the wise” and “forward wits” which appears in the final chorus of Doctor Faustus—a contrast which, as I have argued elsewhere, is effectively deconstructed by the syntactical ambiguity of the last lines of this play (“Self-image” 133).
26
By my count there are twenty distinct places in parallel
passages at which the 1616 or B text diverges from the 1604 or A text
in what could be described as theologically motivated ways.10 Only six
of these are merely mechanical substitutions of, for example,
“heaven” for “God.” The other fourteen changes are of clearly
doctrinal import, and function together to re-orient the play in relation
to the dominant ideology whose faultlines the A text so terrifyingly
exposes. Thus, for example, Faustus’s A-text cry,
Oh God, if thou wilt not haue mercy on my soule,
Yet for Christs sake, whose bloud hath ransomd me,
Impose some end to my incessant paine (A: 1483-85; V. ii.
91-93)
becomes in the B text something at once less vivid and more
moralistic:
O, if my soule must suffer for my sinne,
Impose some end to my incessant paine (B: 2067-68).
The disturbing (but entirely orthodox) notion that there is a category
of people who will not receive mercy because they are not among the
elect, and therefore not among those for whom Christ's blood was
shed, has been replaced by an acknowledgment of guilt; the question
of God’s role in Faustus’s present and future sufferings has been
effaced.
In the immediately preceding scene a similar effect can be
noted. According to the Old Man of the A text, Faustus’s sins can only
be expelled by "mercie Faustus of thy Sauiour sweete, / Whose bloud
alone must wash away thy guilt" (A: 1312-13; V. i. 45-46); at the same
time, however, the Old Man expresses a violent revulsion from the
10 These occur at the following places in the two texts (in the lineation of Greg's parallel-text edition): A: 92, B: 88; A: 141-42 (not in B); A: 298, B: 279; A: 446 (not in B); A: 465, B: 413; A: 519, B: 466; A: 631, B: 573; A: 708, B: 649; A: 712, B: 653; A: 726-28 (not in B); A: 1302-13, B: 1813-29; A: 1315 (not in B); A: 1327-28, B: 1841-42; A: 1329, B: 1843; A: 1377-86 (not in B); A: 1462-64, B: 2048-49; A: 1468-69, B: 2053; A: 1471, B: 2055; A: 1483-84, B: 2067; A: 1505, B: 2089.
27
"stench" of his "most vilde and loathsome filthinesse" (A: 1308-9; V. i.
41-42)—hardly an encouraging reaction to a sinner who already
believes that God “loves [him] not” (II. i. 10). In contrast, B’s Old Man
speaks not “in wrath, / Or enuy of thee, but in tender loue, / And pitty
of thy future miserie” (B: 1825-27). His theology is likewise different:
leaving open the possibility that it may be within Faustus’s own power
to repent, he suggests that he is a fitting object of love, human or
divine: “Yet, yet thou hast an amiable soule, / If sin by custome grow
not into nature” (B: 1818-19). Faustus responds in both texts to the
Old Man’s intervention with an outburst of despair, the second line of
which—“Damnd art thou Faustus, damnd, despair and die” (A: 1315;
V. i. 48)—is significantly missing in B. The Old Man counters with a
vision of divine grace, which in neither text does Faustus seem
actually to receive; the Old Man leaves him, in A, “with heauy cheare, /
fearing the ruine of thy hopelesse soule” (A: 1327-28; V. i. 60-61)—
and in B, “with griefe of heart, / Fearing the enemy of thy haplesse
soule” (B: 1841-42). Faustus then asks himself, in A, “Accursed
Faustus, where is mercie now?” A: 1329; V. i. 62)—a question for
which B, re-using an earlier line in a manner that constitutes clear
evidence of secondariness, substitutes “Accursed Faustus, wretch
what hast thou done?” (B: 1843).
These variants shift the meaning of this sequence: where A
implies a causal link between Faustus’s despair and the divine agency
whose mercy hovers just beyond his reach, the faultline which this
text exposes is obscured by B’s insistence on Faustus’s own perverse
agency and that of the “enemy” whose victim he has made himself.
The problem which A presents—that of the perversity of a whole
Calvinistic order of discourse11—is reduced in B to a simpler one, that
of the perversity of a single stage figure. The A-version of this play
11 The best extended study of this discourse and its literary consequences is that of Stachniewski. Warren’s often-cited analysis of the two versions of the Old Man’s intervention is deaf to the theological meanings of the scene.
28
invites us to question an ideological order—and, by implication, the
religious-political system which it legitimizes; the B-version prefers to
interrogate one guilty, terrified mortal.
What these instances of different forms of collaboration—
contemporaneous, diachronic, and institutional—reveal most distinctly
is an oeuvre which from the beginning prompted contestation and
reinscription. In every case I have discussed authorship is in one way
or another parodied, stressed, dispersed, or supplemented. What,
then, would be the difference if the evidence of Marlowe’s texts,
rather than of Shakespeare’s (or, as Gary Taylor proposes, of
Middleton’s), were to provide the basis for our editorial paradigms—for
what Taylor calls “our models of intertextual space” (134)?
The most obvious conceptual change that would be required is
suggested by the fact that while various forms of collaborative
composition and reinscription can be detected in most of the ten
major texts which go by Marlowe’s name, in several cases—1 and 2
Tamburlaine and Hero and Leander, to begin with—the revisionary
processes which followed upon Marlowe’s own work appear to have
been ideologically motivated, and in the revisions to Doctor Faustus
ideological motivation can be demonstrated.
I have argued above that editorial work amounts to a form of
diachronic collaboration, a recursive intervention in the text’s
originary processes as well as an extension of its historical trajectory.
The early textual history of Marlowe’s writings suggests how urgent it
is to recognize that editorial interventions occur within an intertextual
space that also has a clear temporal dimension, and that owes its
original shape to ideological pressures quite different from those of
our own time. Different, and yet perhaps analogous in function. To
revert to a geological metaphor, the early texts reveal faultlines and
patterns of occlusion and subduction that correspond to the pressures
which re-shaped and deformed these texts. However, similar forms of
29
occlusion and subduction are embarassingly evident in twentieth-
century textual critical work—and are similarly the product of
ideological pressures that it is possible to identify. One of the most
interesting facts about the application of twentieth-century textual-
critical methods to Doctor Faustus must surely be that its result, for
something like half a century, was the legitimation as “authentically
Marlovian” of a version of the play that can now be recognized as
having been produced by repressive revisions undertaken a decade
and more after Marlowe’s death.
Does it need to be said that our efforts to restore the contextual
weave which reveals the text’s permeation by and participation in
history are themselves ideologically motivated acts?
7. The “Marlowe effect”?
These suggestions may seem scarcely novel. Leah Marcus, for
example, has advocated a practice of “local” or “topical” reading
which, suspending “our ruling methodologies” in favour of “a more
open and provisional stance toward what we read and the modes by
which we interpret,” would embody “a process of continual
negotiation between our own place, to the extent that we are able to
identify it, and the local places of the texts we read.” Observing at the
same time the fluid and provisional nature of Shakespeare’s play-
texts, she has remarked on the manner in which modern editors have
edited ideology out of these texts (Puzzling 36, 44-45). Elsewhere, in
one of the most stimulating and strenuous of recent textual-critical
interpretations of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, she insists that “It is time
to step back from the fantasy of recovering Marlowe as the mighty,
controlling source of textual production and consider other elements
of the process, particularly ideological elements that the editorial
30
tradition has, by the very nature of its enterprise, suppressed”
(“Textual” 3). But her application of these insights, if in certain
respects intriguing, is in a larger sense disappointing.
Aligning the 1604 or A text of Doctor Faustus with militant
Calvinism, Marcus sees this text as opening up “a dangerous fissure”
in the ideology of the Protestant war party of the early 1590s
(“Textual” 17). The 1616 or B text, she suggests, offers “unsettling
parallels between the activities of the magician and England’s growing
friendship with the Holy Roman Empire” (19); it thus transposes the
play’s “simultaneous exaltation and undermining of official ideology,”
a transgressive “author function” described by Marcus as the
“Marlowe effect” (22), into the accommodationist political mode of the
early 1600s. This opens up “the perverse, interesting possibility that
significant segments of Doctor Faustus actually composed by Marlowe
may have been cheerfully expunged from the play at various times in
order to give it a continuing aura of authorial authenticity” (24).
Aided by this happy paradox, Marcus thus locates the play’s
transgressiveness in the fact that a figure who can be somewhat
tenuously linked in A with the international policies of militant
Protestantism, and more distinctly in B with James I's policy of alliance
with the Holy Roman Empire, is also a demonic conjurer. However, she
has nothing of substance to say about the A text’s much more
sustained and troubling interrogation of the equivocal doctrines of
Calvinism, or about the B text's retreat from and partial erasure of this
interrogation. She thus effectively occludes the play’s most direct
engagement with ideology.12 I would maintain that A is a radically
12 Marcus recognizes, to take just one example, that the A text portrays sin “in the ‘Genevan’ mode as an ingrained condition of infected will” (11). However, her analysis takes no account of the fact, clearly relevant to a play whose protagonist cries, “My hearts so hardned I cannot repent” (A: 647; cf. Exodus 4: 21-10: 27, and Calvin, Institutes II.iv.3 and III.xxiii.1), that Calvinist theology also ascribes sin to the inscrutable determinations of God's sovereign will, which itself both wills and works through the perversity of human wills and of demonic agents. On this subject see Stachniewski 292-94; and for samples of Calvin’s equivocations over the issues of human agency and the relation between the divine will and human wills,
31
interrogative text, and B an “orthodox effacement” of its heterodoxy
(Marlowe 1991: xv); on the basis of an allegorizing reading that links
Faustus with the Protestant war party or with James I, Marcus
represents A and B as alike radical.
Marcus suggests a correlation between B’s location of Faustus in
Wittenberg, which she describes as “a haven for lingering elements of
late-medieval scholasticism,” and the preference for this text on the
part of ‘establishment’ critics who are content with “a brand of
theatricality which relies on spectacle and special effects to
communicate widely accepted cultural ideas” (6-7); and she proposes
a parallel correlation between the preference for A by a younger
“Vietnam era” generation of scholars interested in “theatrical
starkness, iconoclasm, dissonance” and the A-text’s location of
Faustus in “Wertenberg”—no error, Marcus insists, but the duchy of
Württemberg, known to Elizabethan Protestants for its past
associations with Zwinglian radicalism, the Calvinist sympathies of its
duke, and its anti-Imperial orientation (7-8).
Although Marcus is quite right about these textual-political
preferences, the correlations she advances seem peculiar. They are
scarcely compatible with the claim that B is no less radically
transgressive a text than A—but then Marcus does not explain why the
dissident effects of A, but not of B, should have been apparent to
scholars who had no inkling of the political contexts which she
reconstructs. Nor does she try to link these correlations with textual
evidence that might enable an assessment of the divergent
preferences of scholars in terms of the play’s early textual and
political history as well as the ideological postures of twentieth-
equivocations which have a direct bearing on Doctor Faustus, see Marlowe 1991: 200-11. Studies of the manner in which the A version of Doctor Faustus plays upon the anxieties generated by Calvinism, which was incontestably the dominant religious ideology of Elizabethan England, include Hunter 39-66, Dollimore 103-19, and my articles “Misreading” 518-29, and “History” 507-15, as well as my introduction to Marlowe 1991.
32
century textual scholarship. Her characterization of Wittenberg, finally,
is misleading: this university was indeed dominated by a backward-
looking scholasticism in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries--but so also were the other German universities and
academies, where scholasticism was likewise neither “lingering” nor
residual, but firmly (and harshly) in the saddle.13
Despite an expressed interest in “identify[ing] differences
between texts in order to arrive at historically specific différance” (22),
Marcus’s argument is conservative in tendency. Traditionalist
partisans of A or of B have argued for the coherence and aesthetic
integrity of the favoured text, and for the formlessness of what (in
Marcus’s memorable formulation) they have seen as “its dark,
monstrous double” (6); they have also tended to make exaggerated
claims for their text’s closeness to the play’s originary moment.14
Marcus, following the lead of an influential article in which Michael
Warren sought to extend to Doctor Faustus an approach that had
discriminated usefully between the two texts of King Lear, argues for
the coherence and integrity of both A and B, and the continuity in
them of the “Marlowe effect.”
The point of her arguments, like those of Michael Warren, is to
restrict the kind of editorial work that can safely be contemplated.
Warren wanted to see “the abandonment of editions based on
conflations of texts as objects of study or as texts for performance”
(112); Marcus wants “to open up the texts to a process of ‘unediting’”
(23).15 In response to these projects, the questions of text, apparatus,
13 For evidence on the subject, see Wundt, Schüling, Risse, and Freedman. 14 The most recent example of this is Rasmussen’s claim (in a book which is in many ways the most important recent contribution to the textual criticism of this play) that the printers of the 1604 or A text of Doctor Faustus “had as their copy the original foul papers of Marlowe and his collaborator” (31). I do not think this claim can be sustained in the face of countervailing evidence, which includes my own prior demonstration that at II. iii. 35-40 the readings of A are secondary to those of the 1616 or B text (Marlowe 1991: lxviii). 15 She wishes also to “carry [Warren’s] argument further by contending that for Faustus, and for Renaissance drama more generally, a key element of textual
33
and history that have given the foregoing reflections on collaboration
whatever focus they may possess acquire immediate relevance.
There is no necessary connection between the ideological
divergence of the two versions of Doctor Faustus and the question of
what editorial procedures, beyond the production of facsimiles or
parallel diplomatic editions of A and B, may be appropriate. However,
quarto and folio King Lear are two distinct, authorial (and not
evidently collaborative) versions of a play. In contrast, A and B
Faustus, while still more divergent, are collaborative (and in the case
of B, diachronically collaborative) texts, connected in parallel passages
in a manner which, though complex, can be briefly described. B's
parallel passages are both censored and revised; they are, moreover,
largely dependent upon the 1611 reprint of A (Marlowe 1950: 63-72)—
though in at least two instances it can also be demonstrated that short
sections of A are secondary to the parallel passages in B (Marlowe
1991: lxvii-lxviii).
There can be no excuse for an editorial failure to recognize the
temporal priority, the temporal integrity, and (however recursively
constituted) the greater authenticity of the A version of the play. But
when an analysis that is alert to the ideological contexts that inform
the play, and alert to the collaborative processes that have shaped its
textual differentiation, indicates to us that the B text is at certain
points prior to A, we may feel inclined to question the wholesale
dismissal of the B text by some recent editors of A-text editions.16
There is in any event no reason, so far as I can see, why editors and
textual critics should want to submit, in the name of “un-editing,” to a
indeterminacy is ideological difference” (3). This claim seems to me incoherent: how can ideological difference be manifested, unless through specific textual differences? Textual indeterminacy, moreover, is a notion that sits oddly in the writing of a scholar committed to “unediting,” since it implies consideration of a field of variants—a task that in turn implies the possibility and the potential utility of editorial work. 16 See for example the introductions to the editions of Ormerod and Wortham and of Gill (Marlowe 1985 and 1990).
34
new form of what Greg in a deservedly famous article termed “the
tyranny of copy-text” (49).
8. Malone lives
The work of Leah Marcus seems to me representative, in its
strengths and weaknesses, of the best current textual-critical work on
Marlowe. If, while admiring her recognition of a need for ideological
alertness, I resist the manner in which she moves to this end, I also
find myself wanting to resist her more recent claim—linked, one may
suspect, to her commitment to “unediting”—that “For better or for
worse ..., the Age of Malone has passed” (“Recent” 400).
My resistance to this claim stems in part from a feeling that in
certain respects the Age of Malone has hardly properly begun. In the
mid-1960s Fredson Bowers described the work of Shakespeare editors
in the following terms: “The editor of a typical modern text is ... likely
to rely for convenience on the faulty Old Cambridge collations to give
him the readings of the various early editions and a conspectus of
editors; at the most, and then only in exceptional cases of conscience,
may he check his paste-up sheets against some single copy of the
appropriate early edition” (156). Does this not sound rather like the
practice of Edmond Malone’s eighteenth-century predecessors?
I am motivated as well, I must confess, by the fact that Marcus’s
claim, which concludes her 1992 round-up of the previous year’s work
in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, follows hard upon her (generous)
assessment of my Doctor Faustus edition. To be thus labelled as
participating, whether as agent or merely as symptom, in something
as epochal as the End of the Age of Malone, is oddly disconcerting.
35
Is it in consequence of this embarrassment that I hear,
suddenly, a calm voice with a slight Irish lilt imaging what might
almost be a textual-critical apocalypse?
This tangle of grey bodies is they. Silent, dim,
perhaps clinging to one another, their heads
buried in their cloaks, they lie together in a heap,
in the night.
It is curious how willingly, at moments of rhetorical distress, Samuel
Beckett comes to one's aid. Having helped Michel Foucault through
the famous opening sequence of his “Discourse on Language,” he is
now, it seems, going to relieve me of the necessity of providing this
much slighter paper with a peroration. But is it possible to
misrepresent as ‘peroration’ this voice collapsing into silence?
never there he will never
never anything
there
any more (Beckett 396-98).
The last lines—you will have recognized them—of Malone Dies.
Edmond Malone? So has the Age of Malone indeed passed? Or
should we rather be imagining a larger continuity, strained but not
ruptured by a shift in paradigms? For listen: the voice, or another one
much like it, begins again:
Malone is there. Of his mortal liveliness little
trace remains. He passes before me at doubtless
regular intervals, unless it is I who pass before
him. No, once and for all, I do not move. He
passes, motionless. (403)
One of these two, the speaker of The Unnamable and this spectral
Malone, appears to be revolving around the other. Which, then, is at
the centre, and which at the circumference? “I like to think I occupy
the centre,” says the voice, “but nothing is less certain” (406). And
36
then, in words which, if spoken by a Shakespearean scholar, or a
textual critic of early modern literature, might be taken to imply the
dawning of historical consciousness:
It is equally possible, I do not deny it, that I too am
in perpetual motion, accompanied by Malone, as
the earth by its moon. In which case there would
be no further grounds for my complaining.... (407)
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