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SHAKSPER 2008: Roundtable Digest: Shakespeare's Intentions
From: Hardy M. Cook (editor@SHAKSPER.NET) Date: 05/02/08
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 19.0250 Friday, 2 May 2008 From: Cary DiPietro <cary.dipietro@utoronto.ca> Date: Thursday, 1 May 2008 11:02:24 -0400 Subject: Roundtable Digest: Shakespeare's Intentions As we wait for potential contributors to gather their thoughts and weigh in on the discussion, we turn in this second installment of the Roundtable to John Drakakis writing on the topic of "Intention and Textual Authority." I should note that this title comes not from John; I initially asked if he would be interested in addressing the question of how a textual editor approaches intention, particularly in relation to the construction or reconstruction of an ideal or authoritative "authorial" text. What follows is a much wider ranging discussion, wonderfully so, and one that would be ill-served by the heading, "intention and editing." What I find particularly instructive here is how an intentional fallacy (though of a different sort than first formulated by Wimsatt and Beardsley) is shown to be "deeply embedded" in multiple related cultural practices, from the currently popular "speculative" biography to criticism and, especially, textual editing. John raises a series of questions near the end of his discussion, questions that are not dissimilar to some of the questions I raised at the end of the last installment, though he comes at the topic from a slightly different angle: where John asks if "intention" has a place in contemporary textual practice in the "aftermath of theories of 'subjectivity,'" and how or whether "intention" might be revised in the absence of now outmoded assumptions about authorship, my own concerns revolve around the question of what it means to "do" literary criticism, whether it's possible to practice literary criticism proper without some recourse to intention, and, specifically, whether literary criticism as an institutional discipline is sustainable in the absence of those romanticist and aestheticist assumptions that propelled the initial professionalizing of "lit crit" in the early twentieth century. I think John implicitly answers this question, perhaps explicitly when he turns to Terence Hawkes and the now familiar argument for "presentism." While I'm inclined to agree with John when he suggests that "meaning by Shakespeare" involves, among other things, the projection of a set of "intentions" upon "Shakespeare," the presentist argument that cultural and historical meanings are made, rather than lying latent in the text and uncovered by the critic, still raises problematic questions about canonicity and disciplinary practice. I invite SHAKSPEReans to respond to any of the questions raised in the past two installments, or to offer other ways of thinking around intention. The next installment will begin with a leading contribution from Alan Dessen, writing from the perspective of a theatre historian on the question of how or whether the dramatist's intentions were accommodated in the Elizabethan/Jacobean theatre. I also invite potential participants to think about, weigh in or ask questions about the place of intention in theatrical performance, whether from a historical or contemporary perspective. ___________________________________ "Intention and Textual Authority" From time to time, the question of "intention" resurfaces, and, perhaps the latest spate of recent biographies of Shakespeare that seek to account for various details in the writer's life that have an implicitly or explicitly causal connection with his writings, have contributed in some ways to a return to the question. However, because of the availability of very limited, though still un-exhausted, evidence Shakespeare's writings are sifted as displaced or projected accounts of actual experience, and as symptoms of the evolution of a particular "mind" working mysteriously but not divorced from the principles of causality. Greenblatt's answering of the question of "How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare" is a lively, partly fictional, or perhaps "factional" account, and it manages with characteristic panache to persuade us to entertain a series of causal connections between actual experience and its resurfacing in the dramatist's "art." In a chapter whose title is tantalizingly Freudian, "Primal Scenes" he suggests a kind of "source" for parts of _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, that he locates in a 1575 entertainment that Leicester staged for the Queen at Kenilworth when "a twenty-four-foot-long mechanical dolphin rose up out of the waters of the lake adjacent to the castle. On the back of the dolphin - in whose belly was concealed a consort of wind instruments - sat the figure of Arion, the legendary Greek musician, who sang... 'a delectable ditty' to the queen" (46). Shakespeare refers to "Orion on a dolphin's back" in a number of plays subsequently, but the connection between the Kenilworth Entertainment and Shakespeare's deployment of this striking image - certainly striking to a modern researcher sifting through documents in an attempt to construct a plausible narrative - is the product of the biographical imagination. Greenblatt's own narrative is hedged around with "seems," "maybes," etc., to the point where we can see the writer being progressively seduced by the very fiction he is in the process of creating. We do not know if Shakespeare knew about this particular entertainment; we do not know whether he had watched it as a boy, we do not know if his father ever took him to see this spectacle, we do not know what contemporaries thought about an eight mile trip from Stratford to Kenilworth. But the adult playwright "remembered" this experience and it provided a useful image in a number of contexts. In other words, agency and intention combine in the moment of composition, to the point where it is difficult to determine whether the dramatist is engaged in an act of creation *ex nihilo* so to speak, or whether, pace the structuralist assumptions of new historicism that we have come to associate with Greenblatt's critical methodology, this is no more than an example of the axis of selection intersecting with the axis of combination, within the overarching structure of a particular system of representation. It may be that just as we might be persuaded to think that Shakespeare was attracted to a particular image - a process that privileges the active agency of the writer - we might also be persuaded to think that the image attracted Shakespeare and in ways that he was unable to resist. In some respects, this is how the attractions of genre operate, although this might still not account for particular departures from generic decorum that we often attribute to a particular writer's "style." In a sense, Greenblatt is subscribing here to a mode of thinking that we recognize from its general appearance in W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley's well-known 1946 essay "The Intentional Fallacy" where a judgment on the efficacy of - in this case - a striking poetic image, derives from a speculative encounter that (perhaps) made an impression on the boy Shakespeare, that he later recalled in a series of plays. We are being invited to observe a range of personal meanings (that in this case are expanded into wider cultural meanings), that afford an insight into the inner workings of the poet's imagination. There is a point beyond which the speculation simply cannot go, and the result is that the quest for cause vanishes into a mystery. The extraordinary success of Greenblatt's book, and of other recent biographies of Shakespeare testifies to an insatiable public appetite to pin down agency, intention and intentionality: to *explain* whatever it was that prompted a writer of Shakespeare's capacity to do what he did, "How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare," or how the person Shakespeare became the poet Shakespeare. Not, of course, "How Shakespeare Became *Shakespeare*." Behind what appears to be a series of empirical and historical statements is - and I use the words here of Wimsatt and Beardsley - "an analytical judgment" that rests in the final analysis upon an "intentional fallacy [that] is a romantic one." I leave aside here the question of where this leaves a "new historicist" reading, simply because I want to identify a tendency that even in the discourse of an extraordinarily astute theoretically aware reader of Shakespeare's writings as Greenblatt, the intentional fallacy is deeply embedded. I am not seeking here to apportion blame, but rather to suggest that the genre of biographical writing employs a series of discursive maneuvers that, no matter how sophisticated the critical engagement of the biographer, ultimately influences in ways that we might want to think about more generally, a narrative strategy. Nor is the biographer free from speculation about her or his intention. Wimsatt and Beardsley quote with some relish (or perhaps not) E. E. Stoll's observation that "the words of a poem . . . come out of a head not of a hat" and the same is true of the words of the biographer. We might ask, what was the intention of the writer Germaine Greer in her "biography" _Shakespeare's Wife_ (2007), or of Rene Weiss's _Shakespeare Revealed: A Biography_ (2007)? What do they all mean? Of course, we tend to treat all of these texts, up to a point in the same way that we might treat a Shakespeare text, not as a series of what Wimsatt and Beardsley would call "practical messages" but as contributions to a particular "art form," and, therefore, available to the faculty of critical judgment. The ultimate yardstick by which we measure their "authority" derives from the extent to which we as readers perceive their narratives to accord with what we know of the ultimate "authority," of Shakespeare himself. Il n'ya pas hors d'intention! Or, as Derrida might have said (though I don't believe he ever did) "There is no outside intention." The challenge that Wimsatt and Beardsley threw down in 1946 has, to use one of Terence Hawkes's pregnant phrases, "had modernity thrust upon it." They were clearly uncomfortable with the shackling of the meaning of a public document, a poem that was in public circulation, to the "authority" of an "author." The slogan "a poem must not mean but be" seems to me to be one of those utterances whose opacity usually becomes clear only when you are half way up the storming of the barricades, by which time any form of hesitation is potentially fatal. The issue has gone through one further transformation since the notorious "death of the author"; if the author is dead, then s/he can have no authority that will guarantee meaning. One of the un-exhausted strands in the recent "presentist" debate involves the investment of the critic/historian/cultural commentator in what the past has left, and the ways in which meanings are "made." Again to quote Terence Hawkes: "We make meanings by Shakespeare." And it might be added, that the meanings we make are over-determined by our "intentions" however complex they may be. Those who believe, mistakenly in my view, that the chapters in Hawkes's _Shakespeare in the Present_ (2002) are little more than idiosyncratic anecdotal "histories" of even more eccentric investors in the reputation and authority of Shakespeare, seem to have completely missed the point. Hawkes' careful, self-conscious, entertaining peeling off of the layers of meaning of these narratives demonstrates the extent to which we all (frequently at even our most guarded moments) can be caught in the act of projection, of displacing on to Shakespeare various attitudes, motives, yes, "intentions" that are our own. Positivist faith in the objective status of the Shakespearean "text" has been shown in the recent developments in textual bibliography to be shaky, if not downright misplaced. What critics believe to be one kind of discourse, frequently turns out to be another: what is thought to be the voice of the poet are sometimes the signatures of the compositor. Let me focus on textual bibliography since it is within this area of Shakespeare Studies particularly, and of Literary Studies more generally, that the issue of "authority" appears in its most tendentious form. The production of texts is what underpins the enterprise of locating meaning, and meaning here is invariably bound up with statements and assumptions about a particular inflection of the principle of "authority." W. W. Greg's "The Rationale of Copy-Text" urges the editor to select a text that is the closest to what the "author" is thought to have composed, on the grounds that that will be the most "authentic." There is, of course, much to be said about what happens to that "authenticity" in the age of mechanical (and now electronic) reproduction that even the facsimile reproduction challenges. We know, for example, that Charlton Hinman's monumental facsimile of the Shakespeare _First Folio_ - even in its second edition - is a fiction, and that no such actual book ever existed. What we tend to forget, of course, is that, for example, the modern editorial practice of normalizing speech-prefixes in printed dramatic texts is a practice dictated by general editors, publishers, and possibly by the assumptions made about the capacities of readers. So that, for example, in a modern text of a Shakespeare play, the appeal to "authority" masks a series of editorial interferences whose existence cannot be linked to the writer to whose "authority" the appeal is being made as a means of validating the editorial enterprise. The recent appearance of multiple or parallel texts of Marlowe's _Doctor Faustus_, Shakespeare's _King Lear_, and now _Hamlet_ is an attempt to refine the principles that sustain the general edifice of "authority" although this does little more than enshrine the principle of *difference* at the very source of textual composition, still leaving open the question of "composition for what"? These are general questions although they cannot be answered in general terms. Literary scholars have now come to realize, belatedly, that the business of editing a text and the questions to which that practice gives rise, are fundamental to everything we do as students of the various forms of linguistic representation and of the assumptions about language that we draw on. We are now much more self-conscious than ever about the decisions we make as editors and about the criteria by which we arrive at those decisions. In other words, just as we may seek to track down, locate, and explain the agency and the intentions of the writer whose texts we seek to re-assemble, so we are engaged in the mobilizing of intentions of our own - in the form of pragmatic decisions based upon a series of protocols that have been established by custom and practice within the field of textual editing. All this, of course, may sound like a plea for the editor's confident and absolute control over the details of a text, where we might think of the marks on a page in a thoroughly positivist way. But behind that posture of positivism lies a series of assumptions about textual composition (writing), printing practice, contemporary theories of reading, the role of "art" in the society for which it was produced, and the historical transformations of reception since. In short, behind what appears to be a "scientific" practice is what Althusser would have called "a spontaneous philosophy." A few initial examples might help to clarify some of these issues. Let us consider the case of "Innogen" the silent wife of the patriarch Leonato, whose name appears in two early scenes of _Much Ado About Nothing_ but who doesn't say a word, and who is not referred to subsequently in the play. Virtually all editors of this play have expunged this character from the text. The Arden 2 editor, A. R. Humphreys erased Innogen on the grounds that she was an unrealized idea that the dramatist failed to, or simply did not develop. This editorial gesture, it would appear, is designed to cleanse the text of the play of imperfections, so that the finished article is the play in its most pristine form with the editor acting as (in this case) a male midwife to the dramatist's momentarily faltering imagination. At this particular moment of composition Shakespeare's "imagination" was too fertile for its own good, and it requires the superior "authority" of the editor to bring this imagination to heel. Humphreys also normalizes speech prefixes, so that Dogberry is *always* "Dogberry": he is never "Andrew," or even more interestingly, "Will Kempe," even though these are the marks on the page in the 1600 quarto version of the text, and Humphreys emends the line at the end of act 5 that is there attributed to Leonato, to the Folio reading: "Benedick: Peace I will stop your mouth." Let me take "Innogen" first. The editorial assumption seems to be here that despite our perennial fulminations about the dramatic value of silence in performance, a play-text in print should only contain a record of those dramatic characters who actually speak. I have never seen a production of the play in which Innogen appears onstage, although given this particular play's commitment to various forms of gendered silence (in particular to the silence of Hero, and the patriarchally enforced silence of Beatrice at the end) Innogen would seem to occupy a position of no little importance. She is, in short, "the silent woman," a type that appears to have fascinated more than one dramatist (and indeed, audiences) during this period. The power of editorial tradition, however, is great; and, even in Claire McEachern's Arden 3 edition of the play, "Innogen" is "retired" gracefully from the fray. This example raises some questions: (i) what is the status of the 1600 text of the play? Where did it originate: in the theatre, or in the writer's "foul papers"? (ii) What therefore was the status of the hypothetical manuscript from which the compositor(s) set the play? (iii) If the manuscript was "foul papers," then what was Shakespeare's *intention* in writing the name "Innogen" at the head of opening scenes of the play? (iv) Who was the actual *agent* of the inscription? This is not an exhaustive list, but unless we explore it then the *meaning* of the name "Innogen" remains obscure. The solution, of course, is not to eliminate "Innogen" altogether. The case of Dogberry is no less fascinating and has a very direct bearing on questions of agency and intention. In act 4 scene 2 of _Much Ado_, one of the lines attributed to Dogberry contains the speech-prefix "Andrew" (4.2.4), and another "Kemp" (4.2.10), and another attributed to Verges contains the speech-prefix "Couly" (4.2.70). The Arden 2 editor simply notes the variations, but McEachern's note reads as follows: "The original SPs throughout this scene, which denote actors' (or intended actors') names, betray the marks of the play's composition, and perhaps the copy-text that served as the basis for Q was a promptbook used in the theatre and hence puzzled over by the compositor." (278, n. 1+) McEachern's footnote is exemplary in that it directs our attention to a number of possible explanations. Although actors' names as speech-prefixes are not common in late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century play-texts, they do occur; and the question is: are they the result of the writer's own inscription at the moment of composition, and, therefore, expressive of an *intention* or were they inserted subsequently at a stage before the manuscript arrived at the printing house, and are, therefore, a record of theatrical practice? I have my doubts about how much "puzzling" compositors went in for, since the instability of speech-prefixes in this instance is matched by an even greater instability in another play published in quarto in 1600 by James Roberts, not Valentine Simmes, _The Merchant of Venice_ where Lancelet appears variously as abbreviations of that name and "Clown," and where Shylock occasionally appears as "Iewe." In the case of the figure of the "clown/Andrew/Kemp/Dogberry," it is difficult to do more than conjecture about a precise sequence of inscription. The only actual prompt-book that I have seen, that of Dekker's _The Welsh Ambassador_, doesn't, I seem to recall, include the names of actors in speech-prefixes; although if that is indeed the case, it would provide insufficient evidence to negate a practice of which the _Much Ado_ examples offer some evidence. But, if indeed, the instability occurred at the level of *composition*, then this seriously complicates the business of agency and intention. Here "intention" is over-determined by theatrical practice - that whereby a specialist actor was assumed to occupy a particular theatrical role. In other words, we need to revise radically our sense of what writerly "creativity" involved, even to the point where we might be able to suggest that in cases such as this custom and practice determined the flow of the writer's imagination to the point where it was the knowledge of the comic skills of Kemp and Cowley that governed what was written down. Here agency and intention look as though they could have been separated from each other. The need for precision at the level of inscription here *might* have been the consequence of a knowledge that specialist "clowns" frequently improvised. I am not sure whether this thought can be taken forward or in what direction, although I think we should take care when we speculate. What I am stumbling towards here is a species of "intertextuality" that *may* have operated at the deepest level of the business of the text's composition; either that, or that these examples are the traces of a different kind of "intertextuality" in which all we have is the residue of a theatrical practice that leaves its traces at a time when the impulse to normalization was still unstable. We are familiar with early modern texts as containing traces of compositorial practice, and as Jerome McGann urged us some years ago, we need to take care not to confuse linguistic and compositorial evidence when we read them. There is a third, more radical possibility, and one that takes us back to a much undervalued book that Terence Hawkes published in 1975, _Shakespeare's Talking Animals_ in which he made the case for the Elizabethan theatre as a space for "oral" literature. Subsequently, Bruce King, and in a very different way, Robert Weimann, have taken this topic up. What we do not have is a detailed examination of the practices of oral composition *as they affect* the business of playwriting. The work of Albert Lord, James Notopoulos (in the 1930s), and later Marshall McLuhan, all in various ways deal with questions of formulaic composition and the practices of the "oral" poet able to improvise within strict limits (I suppose that modern examples might be traditional Blues singers, or jazz improvisers). If we embark on this route, then we radically disrupt the romantic notions of "intention" and we are then forced to rethink "agency" as well, especially since it addresses that complex interface between the "non-literate" as a mode of being in language in the world and the "literate." Here the work of Eric Havelock on Plato, and Walter Ong on Ramus is important, I think. I am also aware that this strand could very easily lead into the question of the operations of "memory" of memorialization, of cultural memory, and of the role of the theatre in these operations. But let me come back down to earth to deal briefly with a third example from _Much Ado_, that of the attribution of the line: "Peace. I will stop your mouth." (5.4.97). This line in Q and F is attributed to Leonato, but the Arden 2 editor follows Theobald in attributing it to Benedick and adds the substantive stage direction (following Theobald's "*kissing her*"): *Bene*. Peace! I will stop your mouth [*Kisses her*.] In an essay I wrote on the play in 1986, I mistakenly discarded the editorial tradition, took the Theobald reading as substantive and linked the implied gesture of Benedick to a passage on kissing in Castiglione's _The Book of the Courtier_. I am now in the process of re-writing that essay, and I will not make the same mistake again. McEachern correctly attributes the line to Leonato and her edition reads: LEONATO Peace! [*to Beatrice*] I will stop your mouth. [*Hands her to Benedick*.] Leonato's patriarchal power at this point in the play should give us some pause for thought; and if the silent Innogen were also onstage at this moment, we might be prompted to wonder what Beatrice, and, of course, Hero are getting into! Beatrice might have a point, and Hero is about to become another Innogen. If we extrapolated this thought further, then we need to revise our perception of the bastard Don John and of the social relations that this play represents. But the other question that these variant readings raise has to do with Theobald's editorial "intention" here in correcting (as he obviously saw it) the textual evidence of both quarto and folio. Was he *improving* Shakespeare's text or was he unconsciously grafting onto it a particular model of marital relations that he thought appropriate? We could, of course, add to this list of examples from Johnson's edition of Shakespeare, but allow me to content myself with a general comment about editorial tradition: that the history of Shakespeare editing seems to have been remarkably obedient to editorial tradition and that in instances such as that of McEachern, these traditions now need to be re-examined and where necessary, revised. There are signs that they are beginning to be, but there is much more work to be done. A number of general questions flow from the issues I have tried to raise briefly above: (1) In the aftermath of theories of "subjectivity" can we talk seriously any more about the very kind of "intention" that in a slightly different discursive register Wimsatt and Beardsley problematized? (2) If we take the view that despite a kind of common-sense "intention" involving the decision to write at all, the choice of form, idiom, genre, the choice of means of dissemination, etc., the writer can never be an authoritative *source* how should we revise the concept of intention? (3) If we kill the author off, in the Barthesian, or even the Foucauldian sense of "the author" what are the conditions in which writing, as an event, takes place? (4) Should we not be a lot more precise in defining the *kinds* of writing that a Shakespearean play contains? I do not believe that the case for Shakespeare's plays as examples of "literary" writing has been made, but what does "theatrical" writing, or indeed "oral" writing involve, and how relevant might these distinctions be to the matter in hand? In these concluding remarks, I have in mind in relation to the third question Sean Burke's book _The Death and Return of the Author_ (1992, reprinted 1999). Of Barthes, Derrida and Foucault, Burke writes: "They *created* oeuvres of great resonance, scope and variety. They became more than critics: a vast body of secondary literature around their work, one which generally has sought not to contest or deconstruct what they say, but rather has re-enacted precisely the predominance of source over supplement, master over disciple, primary over secondary. They have been accorded all the privileges traditionally bestowed upon the great author. No contemporary author can lay claim to anything approaching the authority that their texts have enjoyed over the critical establishment in the last twenty years or so. Indeed, were we in search of the most flagrant abuses of critical *auteurism* in recent times then we need look no further than the secondary literature on Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, which is for the most part given over to scrupulously faithful and almost timorous reconstitutions of their thought." (178) We would be mistaken if we thought this was a statement of someone who is antipathetic to careful theoretical enquiry, but it is something we need to think about when we construct that curious knot of concepts that entwine "intention" and "authority." I have taxed patient readers with too long an introduction, but may I make one request: the previous "Roundtable" strands have petered off into obscurity simply because particular contributors used the opportunity to parade thoughtless prejudice. Perhaps on this occasion, we might pause to think about how we might take the debate forward without getting bogged down in entrenched positions. We have enough material within the Shakespeare oeuvre to provide us with a variety of examples that we can profitably discuss, and that may, I think, lead us to conclusions that we might not have expected when we started to think about this topic. John Drakakis University of Stirling April, 2008 Works Cited Burke, Sean. _The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida_, 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. Greenblatt, Stephn. _Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare_. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2004. Hawkes, Terence. _Shakespeare's Talking Animals: Language and Drama in Society_. London: E. Arnold, 1973. ---. _Shakespeare in the Present_. London: Routledge, 2002. Shakespeare, William. _Much Ado About Nothing_, Arden 2 series. Ed. A. R. Humphreys. London: Arden, 1981. ---. _Much Ado About Nothing_, Arden 3 series. Ed. Claire McEarchern. London: Arden, 2005. 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_. U of Kentucky P, 1954. 3-18. _______________________________________________________________ S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List Hardy M. Cook, editor@shaksper.net The S H A K S P E R Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net> DISCLAIMER: Although SHAKSPER is a moderated discussion list, the opinions expressed on it are the sole property of the poster, and the editor assumes no responsibility for them.
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