The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 29.0247 Thursday, 5 July 2018
[1] From: Thomas Krause <
Date: July 3, 2018 at 7:52:53 PM EDT
Subj: Re: SHAKSPER: Young Hamlet
[2] From: Steve Urkowitz <
Date: July 4, 2018 at 9:54:01 AM EDT
Subj: Young Hamlet ? Queries for Ward Elliot and Gerald Downs, for Independence Day
[3] From: Steve Roth <
Date: July 4, 2018 at 2:55:19 PM EDT
Subj: Re: SHAKSPER: Young Hamlet
[4] From: Gerald E. Downs <
Date: July 4, 2018 at 3:57:12 PM EDT
Subj: Re: Young Hamlet
[5] From: Gerald E. Downs <
Date: July 4, 2018 at 3:57:12 PM EDT
Subj: Re: Young Hamlet
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Thomas Krause <
Date: July 3, 2018 at 7:52:53 PM EDT
Subject: Re: SHAKSPER: Young Hamlet
A few years ago, I looked at the question of Q1 from a very different perspective, but I seem to have reached the same conclusion as Ward Elliott’s computer program and the majority of contributors to this thread. My observation was that Q1 appears to have omitted, altered, or added various passages all with a view toward avoiding offense to King James, who had just ascended to the throne and had just become the company’s patron. Specifically, (1) King James had repeatedly debased the Scottish coinage, so references to coinage debasement were removed, and (2) there were well-recognized parallels between King James’s mother Mary Queen of Scots and Gertrude (and King James and Hamlet, for that matter), so Gertrude is portrayed in a somewhat kinder light. With footnotes omitted, here is what I wrote on the Gertrude modifications:
“Gertrude Queen of Scots?
“Independent support for the notion that the first quarto was meant above all not to give offense to King James comes from its benign treatment of Queen Gertrude (Gertred, in Q1). The parallels between Hamlet’s mother and King James’s mother—Mary, Queen of Scots—have been noticed before: Three months and six days after the murder of her husband (Lord Darnley, James’s father), Mary married the man who was roundly suspected of being the murderer, and within a few more months, the fallout from the event forced Mary to abdicate the throne of Scotland in favor of her then 13-month old son, James. An acting company seeking to curry favor with its new sponsor and King would understandably be concerned about the parallels between Gertrude and Mary.
“The easiest way to solve the problem would be to trim down and alter Gertrude’s role to remove ambiguities about her possible complicity in the murder and make her more sympathetic all around. That appears to be what was done. Among the many differences in Gertrude’s role between Q1 and the other texts are that (1) Claudius no longer refers to her as his “imperial jointress” and makes no other endearing references to her, (2) the ghost does not instruct Hamlet to leave her to heaven and her conscience, (3) in the closet scene, she categorically denies any involvement in the murder, (4) in the closet scene, the ghost asks Hamlet to “comfort” her, (5) she doesn’t call Laertes’s followers “false Danish dogs,” (6) she doesn’t refuse to see Ophelia, and, most significantly (7) a whole scene has been added in which Horatio tells her of Claudius’s attempt to have Hamlet killed, and in which she places herself firmly on Hamlet’s side against Claudius (15.1–34). The result in Q1 is a more sympathetic character, and one less likely to give offense to the new king.
“The seemingly methodical omission in Q1 of references which in Q2 and F refer to the debasement theme, together with the significant changes in the queen’s character, point to the conclusion that Q1 is a version of the play that was edited by someone intent on not offending King James. This does not answer the question whether Q1 was a memorial reconstruction or not, but it does suggest that the text on which Q1 was based comes later in time than those on which Q2 and F were based, and was probably prepared either shortly before or shortly after King James took the throne in March 1603.
“Accordingly, the proposed debasement not only resolves ambiguities in the picture in little, two pictures, and inhibition/innovation passages, but it also suggests that (1) of the three extant versions, the second quarto’s handling of the picture in little line was closest to Hamlet’s original source, and (2) that the first quarto—edited as it was for the sake of King James—could aptly be renamed the King James Hamlet.”
In the footnotes I observed that the omission of “false Danish dogs” would also have avoided offense to King James’s wife, Anne of Denmark.
I don’t offer this as conclusive proof that Q1 came after Q2 and/or F – coincidences happen – but I do think it is good evidence in support of that hypothesis. If anyone else is aware of other ways in which the differences between Q1 and the other versions might be seen as trying to avoid offense to King James, I’d be interested to hear them.
Tom Krause (www.wmshakespeare.com)
[2]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Steve Urkowitz <
Date: July 4, 2018 at 9:54:01 AM EDT
Subject: Young Hamlet ? Queries for Ward Elliot and Gerald Downs, for Independence Day
Before we melt into July 4th puddles of silliness, and while I wait for my copy of Terri Bourus’ volume to see what other kinds of smoke emerge into the otherwise ever-lucid air of HAMLET textual scholarship, I’d like to offer a few procedural suggestions and questions:
First, for Ward Elliot: Won’t the selection of a “highly corrupted” sample of HAMLET Q1 and his own modernization of its spelling by Mark C Hulse potentially skew results of analysis of Q1? Simply by calling that chunk highly corrupted seems to, shall we say, prejudice the likelihood that its normalization would be treated in the same way as an equivalent “uncorrupted” passage from Q2 or F HAMLET? Maybe the maths got no dog in the fight, but it seems as if Hulse has been won over to the dark side of the Scriptural Force from the get-go. I wonder if there is any chance of comparing Hulse’s Q1 modernized spelling with David Bevington’s on the Internet Shakespeare Editions / UVIC site.
It took Hulse’s inquiry, which included his willingness to pick a “highly-corrupted” midsized block from Q1 and modernize its spelling for our testing, plus a look at NOS AC, for us to realize that the stakes of Q1’s authorship could be much higher than we had expected.
Our evidence, based on Hulse’s least-canonical-looking, 3,353-word Q1 sample block, let’s call it Q1HU, is that it is much more likely to be a bad quarto, misremembered and garbled by someone other than Shakespeare, than an early work purely by Shakespeare himself.
Further, can you help us by recounting just which 4 of your 29 tests distinguish Q1 from Q2 and F and which tests contrarily affirm their similarity (or are simply inconclusively neutral)? Do you have any chews-through of things like Q1 and F LEAR (not all that different, one from another), Q1 and Q2 R&J (very very different)? (I am trying to recall Tarlinskaya’s findings—gone , , , gone.) Are there more useful and/or less useful test-engines being deployed?
Maybe a sample of the LEAST garbled, MOST canonical looking chunk of Q1 text would yield a different result on these tests? I dunno, but ain't that what research is supposed to be for? Measuring and comparing, but using the same or equivalent measures, and evaluating the accuracy of the measures?
Query for Gerald Downs: Suppose there’s a “reasonable” explanation other than memorial reconstruction for some of your examples that you and the majority of textual scholars believe in. Here’s the instance you chose as illustrative:
But Q1 is known for ridiculous misremembering:
Q2: King. How fares our cosin Hamlet?
Ham. Of the Camelions dish, I eate the ayre,
Promiscram’d, you cannot feed Capons so.
(a play?
Q1: King How now son Hamlet, how fare you, shall we haue
Ham. Yfaith the Camelions dish, not capon cramm’d,
Feede a the ayre.
I father . . .
The trouble is, Q1 apology has got used to ignoring the best nonsense as if it weren’t evidence.
Q1 here ain’t NECESSARILY memorial nonsense. As I suggested some decades ago, this passage could instead far more likely result from a Q1 compositor’s typesetting of a manuscript on which someone (duh! -- Shakespeare?) inscribed “shall we have a play?” and “I father” in the right margin as a late addendum that was supposed to be a second question-and-response as it appears properly set in Q2. Here’s an attempt to show this on an e-mail screen, using ALL CAPS for what I propose is the marginal addendum and vertical lines to indicate the "normal" right margin:
King How now son Hamlet, how fare you, || SHALL WE HAUE A PLAY?
Ham. Yfaith the Camelions dish, not capon cramm’d, || I FATHER . . .
Feede a the ayre. ||
If the compositor of Q1 set what I suggest he had before him, then Q1 maybe represents a messy manuscript addition, no memorial agent required. But then try imagining the gyrations and jugglings of words necessary for Q1 to have been the product of someone's INCOHERENT recall and inscription: human minds, even as confused as my own, don't really babble that way.
There’s another moment in HAMLET, though, when the Corambis part indeed degenerates into incoherent spluttering:
Cor. Madame, I pray be ruled by me:
And my good Soueraigne, giue me leaue to speake,
We cannot yet finde out the very ground
Of his distemperance, therefore
I holde it meete, if so it please you,
Else they shall not meete, and thus it is.
[ISE, Q1, Bevington, accessed 7/4/18]
The last two lines just don’t make sense, do they? One of the grand promulgators of memorial reconstruction explained just what far-flung words churned through the reconstructor’s mind to get to this nonsensical Q.E.D.: “thus it is.” But the AUTHOR (duh? -- Shakespeare?) has WRITTEN this incoherence, not a dumbo actor having forgotten a lost coherence. We can tell because the next line in Q1 has the King say, essentially, “Huh?” ---
King What i'st Corambis?
The incoherent chunks and the King’s response go together and serve to characterize Corambis as someone who can speak nonsense. [That happens elsewhere in the role when he forgets what he was talking about while giving instructions to Montano (Q1) / Reynaldo (Q2).] We need not say that Shakespeare was responsible for every textual variant, but we also need not say that every variant had to arise from hypothetical malignant intervenors. Revision happens. Shakespeare happens to revise. Mistranscription also happens, and doubtless some compositorial or scribal glitches enter the stream. We can often see many examples of them at the sites of transcription and typesetting. But wholesale reconceiving of a role—such as what happens to the Queen between Q1, Q2, and minimally but strikingly in F as well—is playwrighting. HAMLET 1603 by SHAKESPEARE AND THE BOYS PLAYING OPHELIA AND THE QUEEN ? Silly season! See my still-insufficiently referenced essay, “Five Women Eleven Ways,” and my most recent, “Shakespeare’s Revision of Juliet, Lady Capulet and the Nurse.” (Complete references on request). Over and over, later-printed texts reveal patterned, consistent, and (yes) authorially purposeful and Shakespearian-elegant alternatives, developments, re-workings, revisions, re-thinkings. You don’t want to look? No pro’lem. You want to imagine PIRATES? STENOGRAPHERS? Sure. Thought is free. “Stupid” is indeed a protected entitlement. We’re celebrating Independence Day, so why not cut loose from those constraints of reasoned argument and the culture’s accumulated, painstaking observations of how humans actually act?
But it’s hot, and the Capells are abroad. Who wants to fight over something so lost in memory?
Steve Urquartowitz,
Celebrating Freedom in this holiday world
[3]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Steve Roth <
Date: July 4, 2018 at 2:55:19 PM EDT
Subject: Re: SHAKSPER: Young Hamlet
Hi all:
Thanks for all the discussion. Just what I’d hoped for to sort out what I think about all this.
1. I’m quite excited to see Ward Elliot’s “extract” comparing a sample from Q1 Hamlet to early Shakespeare. (Thanks to Mark Hulse for the initial question and the modernized sample.) I expressed hope for exactly such in my leadoff post here re: Young Hamlet. I’m wondering what this writeup is an extract from. Presumably a larger paper yet to be published? A link/URL to the larger document would be much appreciated, if possible.
The central Table 3 is all run together and unreadable; I’ve been unable to parse and reconstruct it. I can tell, though, that I’d need much more description/understanding of the failed tests to fully evaluate them.
(For SHAKSPEReans who'd like to post tables [and graphics, most other basic formatting]: Even pretty complex Microsoft Word tables copy and paste quite handily into gmail, and Hardy has told me that formatted gmails are conveniently post-able to SHAKSPER. See eg my post here.)
[Editor’s Note: I format in Word but I normally use RFTs. -Hardy]
I’m also curious whether Hulse’s choice of a “highly-corrupted” sample (by his own judgment, I assume) is the best approach to this analysis. Would love to hear thoughts. Seems potentially circular logic?
But assuming those tests and conclusions are solid (which I’m happy to assume, at least provisionally), that’s a darned interesting finding. By these tests, Q1 doesn’t look like a solo (early) Shakespeare composition. But Ward offers only one alternative to that: Q1 is “a corrupted memorial reconstruction” of Q2/F1-ish versions.
There’s at least a third alternative. Given my stated (tentative) belief that Q1 could be by Kyd and Shakespeare, I’d like to know whether the sample look like Kyd. Do we have enough of Kyd’s dramatic writing to draw such conclusions with any confidence?
2. Gerald Downs: “Bourus exemplifies Laurie E. Maguire’s method of textual inquiry: compare texts as little as possible. I advise reading Q1 against Q2 at every spot cited (including before & after transpositions).”
This strikes me as superciliously dismissive. As I highlighted in my post, Bourus’s argument stands atop Margrethe Jolly’s work, which embodies precisely Downs’ recommended method: “reading Q1 against Q2 at every spot cited.” (And not just “spots” of individual words and passages, but larger narrative, dramatic, etc. elements.)
>"mistakes also betray theatrical reporting"
Whether these “mistakes” are from memorial or shorthand reporting, this could certainly be part of the story whereby an early Shakespeare (and Kyd?) Hamlet came to us as Q1. But to add other possible sources from my original post: “(yes, presumably with transcription, composition, and even editorial intercessions to muddy things up).”
This confusion of details is why larger elements than particular words and passages are more revealing evidence for me. The pattern of youth being the obvious example, but I find others I’m excited to explore — notably the absence of the whole pirates business in Q1. (Pervez Rizvi points out as especially significant the “scene in Q1 with Gertrude and Horatio talking about Hamlet’s return from England” — where the whole pirate explanation is conspicuously absent, and the given explanation is decidedly skimpy.)
Re-quoting Gabriel Egan (and myself) from my first post:
“”What really needs to be examined is the dramatic relationship, if any, between…passages in the different versions.’ I would expand that to say: the narrative and dramatic (even literary) relationships between elements — words, passages, plot points, themes, tropes, etc.”
3. Pervez Rizvi:
>"Jolly’s...Ph.D. thesis...is freely available online (https://tinyurl.com/y8babmh4)."
Thanks for the link. The Parergon article I cited (“Hamlet and the French Connection”) is gated, though anyone with an academic affiliation should have Project Muse access. I haven’t compared the dissertation and the article, but since they’re both 2012 I assume they’re very similar.
>”Where Jolly misleads her readers is in claiming that Q2 has only three references to Hamlet’s youth. ... in Q2, Hamlet is directly called “young” by Horatio, Polonius, the Ghost, Claudius, and the Gravedigger; and he is indirectly called young by Polonius (“younger sort”, the phrase Gabriel Harvey famously echoed). The insistence on Hamlet’s being young is as strong in Q2 as in Q1 and Jolly has no warrant for claiming otherwise.”
Aha. I admit to: 1. Raising a mental eyebrow myself at this Q2 assertion by Jolly, and 2. Failing to do the legwork to carefully validate it. I still haven’t found time to do so, and need to. But Rizvi may here have put a shot at the waterline of the young Shakespeare/young Hamlet argument. (For me, though, the ship still floats! Even if it is listing a bit.)
>Jolly “guesses that Hamlet was seven years old when he got piggyback rides from Yorick, and comes out with the non sequitur that this makes Hamlet nineteen, as if Yorick was required to drop dead in the same year in which he gave the piggyback rides.”
Right. A thirty-year-old Hamlet could certainly remember Yorick. From my first post, emphasis added:
Q1 “only tells us that young Fortinbras is at least twelve, and — for Hamlet to remember Yorick — the prince must be at least fifteen or sixteen.”
>Some might point out that it’s simpler to just say that Q1 is the early Hamlet play. But that theory is incompatible with some of the verse in Q1
I’ll say again: I’m not compelled by arguments claiming “mature” composition in Q1. We have too many examples of great literature from 20-somethings for that to carry much weight. A stunningly precocious 25-year-old Shakespeare seems eminently plausible to me.
4. Duncan Salkeld: I’d urge anyone wanting to follow up this thread to consult Paul Menzer’s The Hamlets: Cues, Qs and Remembered Texts
Bourus also discusses this at some length. I find Menzer’s claims less convincing than she does, I think, but there it is.
Thanks for the reminder about Jonson's Hamlet sendup in Eastward Ho! An item I've been meaning to get back to. Shakespeare and London looks very interesting; I've always wondered that he never did much of anything with London (explicitly) in his later plays. Certainly never succumbed to the city-comedy genre.
5. Larry Weiss: “I am curious as to why none of the disputants on the Hamlet Q1 issue has observed the advertisement on the face of Q2” Also: “the advertisement on the cover of Q1.”
It’s true that these commonly-known items have yet to be discussed in this little thread. (Bourus discussed both of them at length, including many previous commentaries.) This does not, I think, suggest ignorance or foolishness by the participants. Just mentioning them and just saying “It strikes me that this claim is more likely to be employed,” or “seems to support” doesn’t add much to my understanding.
6. John Briggs:
“Perhaps I should mention what no-one else seems to have done so far in this discussion: if Ur-Hamlet was indeed written in 1589 or earlier (1587 seems to be the preferred date), then it wasn’t written by the young Shakespeare - who may, of course, have acted in it, although he doesn’t seem to have been associated with the Burbages until he started writing plays in the 1590s”
I completely don’t understand this argument: The Ur-hamlet can’t have been written by Shakespeare before 1590 because Shakespeare started writing plays in the 1590s? Is that the gist?
Thanks,
Steve
[4]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Gerald E. Downs <
Date: July 4, 2018 at 3:57:12 PM EDT
Subject: Re: Young Hamlet
It looks as though bad spelling is not good evidence for Hamlet at age sixteen. But it’s wrong to think spelling counts much in isolated cases anyhow. ‘I haue been Sexten heere man and boy thirty yeeres’ (Q2, where Steve adds a comma) needs no correction per se. If we assume this refers to grave-digger tenure, then ‘that day that our last king Hamlet ouercame Fortinbrasse’ being ‘that very day that young Hamlet was borne’ relates Hamlet’s age pretty clearly. To end 1.1, Horatio decides to tell ‘young Hamlet’ about the ghost of ‘valiant Hamlet’, who slew ‘Fortinbrasse’. Claudius begins 1.2 with reference to his dead brother Hamlet before speaking of the threatening ‘young Fortinbrasse’ (who Steve allows to be at least 12). To differentiate regal sons and fathers of the same names in that way seems natural enough without implying how young. Making Hamlet sixteen in the ‘original’ is not so easy.
However, it’s ‘young Osricke’ in an F s.d. once, and in dialogue F/Q (young Ostricke) twice. Horatio observes that ‘This lapwing runnes away with the shell on his head.’ But we can’t jump to age conclusions because Osric himself announces ‘young Fortenbrasse with conquest come from Poland.’ Young must cover a lot of ground, perhaps including the casting of young players.
Where Q2 prints “I have been Sexten here,” in F1 the gravedigger’s line reads:
I haue bin sixeteene heere, man and Boy thirty yeares.
This line as printed is quite easily parsed with a punctuation emendation . . .
We should all stop (or start) to ask why the texts need better punctuation in the first place. I believe transmission makes it a crapshoot.
I haue bin sixeteene here — man and Boy thirty yeares.
If we are to presume a compositor’s error, we have to imagine that compositor E, who set this section, 1. Saw “sexten” in the manuscript and misread it as “sixten”, then 2. imposed the unusual spelling “sixeteene.” The first seems deeply implausible;
Compositor E was apparently let loose on printed texts; in this case, Q2. If he even noticed a manuscript spelling, a) What manuscript? b) Q2, sexten, Q4, sexten, and c) unusual spellings abound; sexestone F2. Just two lines before: ‘loosing his wits,’ QqFF2F3. You load sexestone tons, what do you get? Another day older, according to Merle Travis.
Interestingly, Harold Jenkins reacts to Hinman on Compositor E’s inexperience: “the case . . . is very strong . . . . That he was therefore John Leason, who began . . . only five months before the printing of the Tragedies is [an inference] which . . . distinguished bibliographers . . . will not persuade us [Jenkins] to believe.”
Yet Leason was seventeen when he began. What Jenkins (a very good editor) misses is that E’s large share of errors in F’s stop-press correction variants (e.g., Hamlet Q2 ‘O treble woe’/Comp. E ‘Oh terrible woer’) represents an unknown number of errors that would have been expected of young Leason and caught in foul proofing before printing began. We haven’t a reliable notion of his rate and severity of error. Jenkins assumes that extant variants indicate few errors; they really apply only to what wasn’t corrected on the first go-round. In other words, an apprentice could be employed on Hamlet no matter how slow or bad he was. Bardolatry was yet to come.
After reading Pervez Rizvi’s qualitative Q2/Q1 point I noticed a likely instance in Furness, citing the 2.2 Ros. & Guil. Dialogue, where Strachey finds that Hamlet “always returns to verse as the language of his practical life . . . whereas, while he speaks prose, he is uttering the thoughts of the bystander and looker-on . . .” True or not, Q2 is prose here. (Q1 lines everything as verse, as if capital letters signify poetry; but that’s the printer’s input.) And when Hamlet saves time—‘anticipating’ his bystander-friends’ reasons for coming and their ‘discoveries’—he steps away from his own late knowledge and feelings to tease, not only the reader/on-looker, but friendly snoops. This begins in F-only text, omitted from, but necessary to Q2:
F: Ham. Denmark’s a Prison.
. . . .
Rosin. We think not so my Lord. [Transposed in Q1, recall.]
Ham. . . . to me it is a prison.
Rosin. Why then your Ambition makes it one . . .
Ham. . . . were it not that I haue had [Malone] dreams.
Guil. Which dreams . . . are Ambition: for the very substance
of the Ambitious, is meerely the shadow of a Dreame.
Ham. A dreame it selfe is but a shadow.
Rosin. Truely, and I hold Ambition . . . but a shadowes shadow.
Ham. Then are our Beggers bodies; and our Monarchs
and out-stretcht [Dead?] Heroes the Beggers Shadowes . . .
Both. Wee’l wait vpon you.
Ham. No such matter . . . . for to speake to you
like an honest man: I am most dreadfully attended;
Q2: But in the beaten way of friendship, what make you at Elsonoure?
Ros. To visit you my Lord, no other occasion.
Ham. Begger that I am . . . I thanke you . . . were you not sent for?
Hamlet toys with his friends, who aren’t going to hear what’s on his mind, though he can safely tell them the truth (if only in part, and not nothing but). Some take his beggary as sour grapes but he’s just joking—the guys couldn’t visit him if he had no body; argo, he’s a beggar. His out-stretched Hero-King, honestly, dreadfully attends him.
When Hamlet tells his friends why they’re there, he reports Mom’s worries over ‘his prophetic soul’; he ‘prevents’ their discovery of the cause ‘he knew not’—his father’s murder. As delight in women fails the ‘haha-’ and ‘aha-moment’ tests, the investigators’ wherefores must not have satisfied the Queen; they try again at 3.2. Before the telling play, Hamlet asks Polonius if the King will ‘hear this piece of work [me]’; he then informs Horatio—in verse—of his plot. After, he again stiffs his other fellow students in sarcastic prose. Q1 is good enough that to expose flaws would take time.
Gerald E. Downs
[5]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Gerald E. Downs <
Date: July 4, 2018 at 3:57:12 PM EDT
Subject: Re: Young Hamlet
Ron Rosenbaum replied to part of my last posting:
I would like to respond to Gerald Downes who blithely tells us he “missed” my essay on Terri Bourus, Tiffany Stern and Q1 <Hamlet> <
In that last remark I meant that I have not read Bourus’s book (2014) and neglected to note my library request ($3, 2 blocks, 1 week). I guess mine will be one of few detailed responses to Steve Roth’s review, though the topic is (relatively) important. I’ve found a quotation from her book that I’d read in another Hamlet article, which partially explains my incuriosity (though I hadn’t remembered the citation).
When I read some of Ron Rosenbaum’s article at Arlynda Boyer’s prodding, I asked: Where have I seen this? Actually, heaven help me, I saw it Online the night before without noticing anything ‘auctorial.’ I’ve read his piece twice now and agree with much of it. (e.g., he has a good take on Occam, as others don’t.)
I had missed the review, from early 2016 until now. Otherwise I probably would’ve read Bourus because she wrote of Tiffany Stern’s “shorthand” article (which I had reviewed on this forum—to great applause, not). I mentioned Rosenbaum’s review because I plan to respond to some of what he said but not until I have seen Bourus. I like to communicate my thoughts to the ether before they are challenged; not that I communicate in real life. (A few may recall that I rated Vickers’s One Lear prior to purchase (and after).
> but feels the apparent freedom in his ignorance to make a catty comment about it, claiming it reduces the matter to “a catfight”, piously deploring ‘academic misogyny”. <
As happens on this forum occasionally, my quotation from Arlynda’s posting was sent in blue only to be displayed defaultily in black. Happens with Italics, too, when formatting. With no other indication (‘>*<’) one must in such instances trust a reader’s ever-ready textual analysis; or repost. In other words, words Ron Rosenbaum finds objectionable are not mine; I was mildly defending his right to disagree with two women at one time, as scholarship demands if necessary. That, notwithstanding a tendency in women and men to misunderstand one another.
They had a waitress there, O she was a dear;
So I explained, the two dollars—was for the beer.
Ben Colder
Two years ago, a TV reporter asked me how it felt to live nearest to the most dangerous intersection in the USA. It’s just a corner, and nothing but a corner. He informed me that 44 people had died there recently. Recalling 4 unlucky pedestrians (to say the least, unless being run over after church is advantageous, as Hamlet worried of Claudius), I correctly suggested the newsman was chasing a misprint.
When we got back from our honeymoon,
I met my mother-in-law.
I got the disappointed blues.
I didn’t take offense at Arlynda’s phrasing but tried to say that inquiry in substance cannot go easy on certain classes of society without loss. I wouldn’t allow too much leeway for ‘different thinking’; still, I deleted some (plagiarized) literary lines for fear they would be misunderstood:
If you don’t think they’re a lot of fun,
Just ask the man who owns one.
Johnny Bond
> I am not an academic. . . . Mr. Downs ought to look to his own prejudices or is it the practice now of academics to vaunt their ignorance with baseless insults. He owes me an apology. <
36 years a locomotive engineer, I’m no academic neither (though I’ve known some). I clep myself scholar only when reading work the like of which in the quality I professed would be called a train wreck. I try not to get mad, hope not to anger others, and like to think I’m less ignorant (if more forgetful) by the day.
> I must admit that I am disappointed by the lack of civility displayed by Downs; I have valued the list because I thought it excluded childish name calling. <
I’m sorry Ron Rosenbaum and I were introduced by a color-o; I’ve thought to ask more of his opinions about King Lear scholarship, for which I had purchased his book (2nd hand?) I believe non-academics, if not too ignorant, can be a vital corrective. I vaguely recall criticizing Shakespeare Wars on a few points (for which I was chewed out). I would like to ask Ron what he thinks about Blayney’s admission that he has never argued authorial Q1 printer’s copy, even though revisionists expressly rely on his argument. I would also like to ask Ron what he thought about Blayney’s review of Vickers; especially his revelations about the Q-cramping Quote Quads. As Rosenbaum and I’ve each corresponded with the recluse, I wonder if Ron had questioned his teasers about the ‘quads’ (as I had done.) I believe our new knowledge is key to understanding Lear textual history. It depends too on Vickers’s insight that F additions are Q omissions. Academia (the part grasping these issues) will avoid discussion, even through next year’s (NOS, MLA) explanatory publications.
I wouldn’t dream of asking Ron Rosenbaum for an apology (Not wishing to scare up my own demons at this late date). But if he wants to do penance, I invite him (for the sake of Q1 Hamlet and other suspect texts) to read my “Memorial Transmission, Shorthand, and John of Bordeaux,” SB 58 (2008-10), Online; and to tell me what he thinks of this most revealing playtext. For those interested in Q1, Q2, and F; the best publication—shame on Academia—is still B A P van Dam, The Text of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1924).
Gerald E. Downs