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Shakespeare After All
“A return to the times when the critic's primary function was as an enthusiast, to open up the glories of the written word
for the reader.”
—The New York Times
“A lifetime of learning has gone into the production of this massive volume.… Garber is sensitive to signi cant details in
the language … and she gives cogent accounts of historical contexts.”
—The Boston Globe
“She lights up the plays with insights you'll kick yourself for not having had first.”
—Newsweek
“A delight…. Polished, thoughtful, eminently useful…. Not only a wonderful guide to the plays, but just as importantly,
it's a guide to the reading of the plays…. Garber writes elegantly and insightfully…. The reader seeking an informed
guide to each play simply can not do better.”
—The Providence Journal
“Impossibly full … engagingly written…. It
Shakespearean course for our time.”
lls you with gratitude on virtually every page. Here, in a book, is a
—The Buffalo News
“An absolute joy…. Extremely lively and witty…. Remarkable…. Authoritative.”
—Tucson Citizen
“Stimulating and informative.”
—The Charlotte Observer
“Garber keeps her eye on the goal, to illuminate the experience of reading and seeing the plays, and achieves it with
quiet efficiency.”
—San Jose Mercury News
“A commanding performance, not to be missed…. Garber brings the Bard into our hearts…. Fascinating.”
—Republican-American (Waterbury, CT)
“Shakespeare After All is worth the cost for the introduction alone.”
—South Florida Sun-Sentinel
“Every page has something that will make you rethink what you've seen or read, or make you want to read a work for
the first time.”
—The Register-Guard (Eugene, OR)
“Her chapters on individual plays have the rhythm of the classroom and the voice of the master teacher who still marvels
at her subject.”
—The Bloomsbury Review
Shakespeare After All
Marjorie Garber is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and American Literature and Language and chair of the
Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She lives in Cambridge and Nantucket,
Massachusetts.
ALSO BY MARJORIE GARBER
A Manifesto for Literary Studies
Quotation Marks
Academic Instincts
Sex and Real Estate
Symptoms of Culture
Dog Love
Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life
Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety
Shakespeare's Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality
Coming of Age in Shakespeare
Dream in Shakespeare
For B. J., the onlie begetter
Indeed all the great Masters have understood that there cannot be great art without the little
limited life of the fable, which is always the better the simpler it is, and the rich, farwandering, many-imaged life of the self-seen world beyond it.
William Butler Yeats, “Emotion of Multitude”
CONTENTS
A Note on the Text
Introduction
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew
Titus Andronicus
Henry VI Part 1
Henry VI Part 2
Henry VI Part 3
Richard III
The Comedy of Errors
Love's Labour's Lost
Romeo and Juliet
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Richard II
King John
The Merchant of Venice
Henry IV Part 1
Henry IV Part 2
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Much Ado About Nothing
Henry V
Julius Caesar
As You Like It
Hamlet
Twelfth Night
Troilus and Cressida
Measure for Measure
Othello
All's Well That Ends Well
Timon of Athens
King Lear
Macbeth
Antony and Cleopatra
Pericles
Coriolanus
Cymbeline
The Winter's Tale
The Tempest
Henry VIII (All Is True)
The Two Noble Kinsmen
Notes
Suggestions for Further Reading
Acknowledgments
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
THERE
ARE MANY
excellent modern editions of Shakespeare's plays. In the Suggestions for Further Reading at the end of this
book I list several of the best-known, most reliable, and most available recent editions, with the expectation that a reader of
this book may already own a copy of the collected works of Shakespeare or individual editions of the plays. The act, scene,
and line numbers cited in the chapters that follow refer to The Norton Shakespeare (1997), itself based on the text of The
Oxford Shakespeare (1986), but readers who own or have access to other editions will be able to nd the quoted passages
without di culty. Line numbers may vary slightly, since lines of prose will be of di ering lengths depending upon the width
of the printed page or column. For textual variants and alternative readings from Quarto or Folio texts, readers should consult
the textual notes in any good modern edition. When citing the names of characters in the plays, I have occasionally departed
from the choices made by the Norton editors, preferring, for example, the more familiar “Brabantio” to “Brabanzio” in
Othello, “Gratiano” to “Graziano” in The Merchant of Venice, “Ancient” Pistol to “Ensign” Pistol in Henry IV Part 2 and Henry
V, and “Imogen” to “Innogen” in Cymbeline. I have also chosen to quote from the 1623 Folio edition of King Lear instead of
the Norton Shakespeare's con ated version. All biblical citations, unless noted otherwise, are from the 1599 edition of the
Geneva Bible.
Although it is not possible to know with certainty the chronology of composition of the plays—or even, sometimes, of their
performance—the sequence given here follows the order suggested by The Norton Shakespeare with the exception of a few
minor changes. For the convenience of the general reader Henry VI Part 1 is discussed before Part 2 and Part 3, even though it
was written after them. The Norton editors place The Merry Wives of Windsor between Henry IV Part 1 and Henry IV Part 2,
but I have elected, again for reasons of readerly convenience, to discuss the two history plays in adjacent chapters. In this
case the plays in question—Merry Wives and 2 Henry IV-—are dated in the same years, so there is no signi cant disruption of
chronology. With Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, two plays thought to have been written in the same time
period, I have reversed the Norton's order, choosing to discuss Shakespeare's love tragedy before moving on to his great comic
send-up of “tragical” love. Likewise, I discuss Cymbeline before The Winter's Tale. Modern scholars di er about which of these
two plays was written
rst; each was performed in 1611. But such changes are a matter of editorial discretion and do not
a ect the argument for a generally historical sequence. Readers should bear in mind that the dating of the plays is in many
cases still highly speculative and controversial, and that it is therefore di cult to draw rm conclusions about Shakespeare's
development as a playwright from this, or any, order of the plays. The presentation of plays in this volume follows the
practice of the Norton, Oxford, and other recent editions in grouping the plays by approximate chronology rather than
according to genres like comedy, history, tragedy, and romance, with the intent of allowing the reader to observe the use of
images, staging, and language across genres in the course of Shakespeare's theatrical career.
Introduction
EVERY AGE creates its own Shakespeare.
What is often described as the timelessness of Shakespeare, the transcendent qualities for which his plays have been praised
around the world and across the centuries, is perhaps better understood as an uncanny timeliness, a capacity to speak directly
to circumstances the playwright could not have anticipated or foreseen. Like a portrait whose eyes seem to follow you around
the room, engaging your glance from every angle, the plays and their characters seem always to be “modern,” always to be
“us.”
“He was not of an age, but for all time.” This was the verdict of Shakespeare's great rival and admirer, the poet and
playwright Ben Jonson, in a memorial poem a xed to the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays. “Thou art a monument without
a tomb,” wrote Jonson,
And art alive still, while thy book doth live,
And we have wits to read, and praise to give.
We might compare this passage to Shakespeare's own famous lines in Sonnet 18, the sonnet that begins “Shall I compare thee
to a summer's day?” and ends:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
The sonnets have indeed endured, and given life to the beloved addressee, but it is the sonnet that praises him, not the
unnamed “fair youth” to whom the sonnet is written, that lives on in our eyes, ears, and memory.
Both “of an age” and “for all time,” Shakespeare is the de ning gure of the English Renaissance, and the most cited and
quoted author of every era since. But if we create our own Shakespeare, it is at least as true that the Shakespeare we create is
a Shakespeare that has, to a certain extent, created us. The world in which we live and think and philosophize is, to use
Ralph Waldo Emerson's word, “Shakspearized.”
“I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I do say so,” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Goethe thought so, too, and so did
Sigmund Freud. So, indeed, did the actress Sarah Bernhardt, who, having played the role in a celebrated production in France
in 1899, and again in London in 1901, declared that she could not imagine Hamlet as a man.
But perhaps Hamlet, a play that from the Romantic era on has been established as the premier Western performance of
consciousness, is too obvious a case to make the point. The Macbeths have become emblems of ambition, Othello a gure for
jealous love, Lear a paradigm of neglected old age and its unexpected nobilities, Cleopatra a pattern of erotic and powerful
womanhood, Prospero in The Tempesta model of the artist as philosopher and ruler. Romeo and Juliet are ubiquitous
examples of young love, its idealism and excess. But if Shakespeare seems to us in a surprising way so “modern,” it's because
in a sense his language and his characters have created a lexicon of modernity. This is a book devoted in part to exploring the
remarkable omnipresence of Shakespeare in our lives.
King Lear as written and performed in its original historical context was concerned with pressing questions for the
seventeenth century, like absolute monarchy, and royal succession and the obligations of vassals. For most citizens of the
twenty- rst century, “king” is an archaic title, as it emphatically was not for the subjects of James I, under whose patronage
Shakespeare's company, the King's Men, performed and prospered. Mid-twentieth-century readers often translated “king” into
“father,” seeing the drama as one centered on the family rather than the realm. Lear's railing against the heavens has often
been understood as existential. At various moments Lear became a sign of male power, of the pathos of aging, even of the end
of an actor's career. “King Lear” is a cultural icon, cited by philosophers, legislators, and politicians, as well as literary
scholars—and gerontologists and therapists. The character has a cultural life derived from, but also distinct from, the play.
The Merchant of Venice is another powerful example of the translatability of these plays. The rst Shylock was a comic butt,
who may have appeared in a red fright wig and a false nose, the standard signs of Jewishness on the Elizabethan stage.
Shylock was played as a comic gure until the mid-eighteenth century, when the actor Charles Macklin transformed him into
a villain. Only in the nineteenth century did Shylock become a sympathetic or a tragic
gure, masterfully portrayed by
Edmund Kean in a performance that impressed Romantic authors like Coleridge and William Hazlitt. (It was Coleridge who
said that Kean had the gift of revealing Shakespeare by ashes of lightning.) The early twentieth century saw empathetic
productions of the play in the Yiddish theater, as well as a monstrous Shylock performed in Weimar under the aegis of Nazi
Germany. After the Holocaust an anti-Jewish portrayal of this gure seems almost unimaginable—which is not to say that it
will not be attempted. The point is that the play has changed, along with the times. The Merchant of Venice itself has a
history, a kind of cultural biography that has transformed it from its moment of origination. Although we can revisit and
understand the context of production and of belief, from the sixteenth century and indeed from the sources that preceded
Shakespeare, this play, like all the others, is a living, growing, changing work of art. The role it plays for contemporary
readers, audiences, and cultural observers is to a certain extent a reflection of its own history.
The same is true with Othello. The question of Othello's particularity as a black man and a Moor has been balanced against
a certain desire to see him as a gure of universal humanity. This tendency toward generalization was in part an homage to
Shakespeare, seen as a portrayer of universal types, and also a liberal shift away from racial stigmatizing, an attempt to
dissociate the play from any tinct of bias. Earlier eras saw all too vividly the hero's color, especially in places, like the United
States, where race and inequality had for a long time been issues of national concern. In the later twentieth century, critics
have emphasized the context of cultural oppression in the play, while others have wrestled with Othello's tendency to
acquiesce with assumptions of his inferiority. Black actors like James Earl Jones and Laurence Fishburne have displaced the
blackface portrayals of the past. Productions still sometimes depict the character as consumed with self-doubt, but the heroic
Othello has returned to the stage and screen—an Othello often portrayed as culturally identi ed with blackness and with his
titular role as “the Moor of Venice.”
One more familiar example, that of The Tempest, may serve to reinforce this general observation about the changing and
growing nature of the plays, and their place as cultural “shifters,” expanding their meanings as they intersect with new
audiences and new circumstances in the world. After years as the premier art fable of Shakespearean drama, The Tempest, the
story of an artist/creator often movingly described as “Shakespeare's farewell to the stage” (although at least one more play
would be written and staged by his company before what scholars think may have been his retirement to Stratford), The
Tempest was reconsidered, in the later twentieth century, as a re ection upon English colonial explorations and “ rst
encounter” narratives of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This reconsideration was framed in part by responses
to colonial and postcolonial issues in the twentieth century, the century in which, and from which, critics and performers now
regarded the play. Caliban's otherness was now celebrated as di erence rather than as cultural immaturity. Pros-pero's
famous concession, “This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine,” is addressed apparently to Caliban, but—as we will see—
the “thing of darkness” is also something Prospero encounters in his own mind and soul. It is important to underscore the
fact that postcolonial readings did not render the earlier understandings and resonances of The Tempest obsolete. Rather, they
augmented, added nuance, questioned verities, such as Prospero's wisdom and ideal mastery, and even toyed with the idea of
reversals of power, giving Caliban and his co-conspirators an alternative voice in the play. Aimé Césaire's Une Tempête and
Roberto Fernández Retamar's Calibán both give Shakespeare's Tempest full- edged postcolonial rewritings. The hallmark of a
complex work of art is that it can not only endure but also bene t from any number of such strong rereadings. This, indeed,
is one appropriate instrumental test of what we have come to call “greatness” in art and literature.
But where did “Shakespeare” stand on these questions? As I will suggest throughout the chapters that follow, the brilliant
formal capacities of drama are such that the playwright's voice is many voices. Shakespeare is Prospero, Caliban, Ariel, and
the wondering Miranda. He is Othello, Desdemona and Iago, Shylock, Portia and Antonio. One of the tremendous
achievements of these remarkable plays is the way one view will always answer another. Desdemona and Emilia debate
women's virtue from the “ideal” and “realist” viewpoints. Neither is de nitively right. Both are “Shakespeare.” No sooner
does Ulysses laud the universal value of “degree” and hierarchy than, in the next moment, he argues that the inferior Ajax be
substituted for the incomparable Achilles. What is Shakespeare's own view of such political questions? The answer—which is
not an answer—lies in his plays. Yet so powerful has been the cultural e ect of these plays that readers, critics, actors, and
audiences often seek to align their meanings with Shakespeare's biography.
In some eras, including our own, there has been a tendency, indeed a desire, to read the plays as indicators of Shakespeare's
mood, life crises, and frame of mind. Thus Thomas Carlyle asked rhetorically, “[H]ow could a man delineate a Hamlet, a
Coriolanus, a Macbeth … if his own heroic heart had never suffered?”1 Certain passages in Hamlet, King Lear, and Troilus and
Cressida were once taken as evidence of a certain “sex horror” on the part of the author, and were traced to his ambivalent
relationship to his wife. The “last plays,” including the sublimely beautiful Winter's Tale and The Tempest—not to mention
Pericles, the most popular of Shakespeare's plays in his lifetime—were dismissed out of hand by certain early-twentieth-
century commentators like Lytton Strachey as infallible indications of the sad decline of a once-great writer who turned to
the genre of romance out of boredom. The political, cultural, and social views of our own era are likewise grafted onto our
Shakespeare, who has been, or has become, a keen analyst of power and gender. In essence, and in e ect, we cannot resist
creating our own Shakespeare. Again, I want to insist that this is a sign of strength in both playwright and critic, not a
condition to be deplored or seen through.
The conditions of the stage in Shakespeare's lifetime unquestionably shaped the kinds of plays and characters he produced.
No women were permitted to perform on the English public stage. All the female roles in his plays were written for and
performed by boy players, skilled adolescent apprentices with high voices that had not yet “cracked,” or changed. And yet
Shakespeare created classic female characters who have become models of speech and conduct across the centuries, from the
“shrew” Katherine to the loving daughters Cordelia and Miranda to Juliet, the modern paradigm of romantic love and
longing.
The many cross-dressed roles in the plays took advantage of this material and historical fact, allowing both maleness and
femaleness to be bodied forth in performance, and leading, in subsequent centuries, to a particular admiration for the
liveliness and initiative of these Shakespearean women. Rosalind, played by a boy actor, cross-dresses as the boy “Ganymede”
to enter the Forest of Arden; Portia, played by a boy actor, cross-dresses as the young doctor of laws to enter the courtroom in
Venice; Viola, played by a boy actor, cross-dresses as the young man “Cesario” in Illyria; Imogen, played by a boy actor, crossdresses as the boy “Fidele” in the Welsh hills.
The theaters were closed after 1642 during the Puritan Revolution, and when they reopened, after the restoration of the
monarchy with the accession of Charles II in 1660, actresses did appear in female roles. Thomas Coryate, an English traveler
in Venice, reported in 1608 that he “saw women acte, a thing that I never saw before—though I have heard that it hath been
sometimes used in London—, and they performed it with as good a grace, action, gesture, and whatsoever convenient for a
Player, as ever I saw any masculine Actor.”2 Some traditionalists of the time decried the change, claiming that the boys had
done a better job of playing women. Female identity on the stage had become—like kingliness, madness, and exoticism—an
aesthetically produced e ect. The actors were not themselves kings, madmen, Moors, or shepherds, but they were able to
portray those archetypes convincingly. This was not a matter of identity but of performance. The advent of actresses, some of
them celebrated for their powerful performances of Shakespearean roles, changed forever how female parts—and female
dramatic characters—were interpreted and understood.
Certainly the social politics of an era have had an e ect upon interpretation. Modern productions of The Taming of the
Shrew often struggle to absolve Shakespeare of antifeminism, much as productions of The Merchant of Venice try to
underscore his empathy for Shylock the Jew or productions of Titus Andronicus to nd some nobility in the villainous Aaron
the Moor. Yet the brilliance and capaciousness of Shakespeare's plays are such that almost always the “answer” to such social
concerns is located right in the play. Iago would not be as powerful a character as he is if his words did not contain some
painful and unwelcome “truth.” Prospero's words do not always trump those of his “servants,” Caliban and Ariel.
Shakespeare always presents both his ideas and his character types contrapuntally, o ering a response and a quali cation,
another way of looking at things, within the play itself. Despite a concerted attempt to nd it, there is no “Shakespearean”
point of view, so that claims like “Shakespeare said” or “Shakespeare believed” or “Shakespeare tells us”—claims that
sometimes seem to imply an authoritative and consistent philosophical consciousness—can always be exposed by looking at
the context of the quotation. Shakespeare's plays do not have a single voice, a lyric “I,” or a “focalized” character through
whom the audience or reader is tacitly expected to interpret the play. Even in the extreme case of Hamlet's musings, or in the
more general case of the dramatic soliloquy, a powerful Shakespearean medium (often, again, excerpted as if it were an
embedded lyric poem, a performance piece), the audience is given extensive evidence within the play to judge and evaluate the
truth claims and ethical assertions that are so eloquently set forth by these charismatic speakers. We should remember that
some of the most e ective soliloquies, both in Shakespeare and elsewhere in English Renaissance drama, are put in the
mouths of, and at the service of, Machiavellian characters: Richard III, Iago, Edmund in King Lear. And what they say is
seductive, sometimes persuasive, and usually e ective, at least in the short term. Yet it is no more—or less—accurate to say
that “Shakespeare's philosophy” is that of Edmund than it is to say that his philosophy is that of Hamlet.
THE STAGE AND THE PAGE
There has always been a productive tension between the idea of the play as a poem or a text and the idea of the play as a
performance. Some portions of Shakespeare's plays are inaccessible to us because they are made up of spectacles or
performances rather than words. Examples include the masque in The Tempest; the apparitions in Macbeth; the tilt, or
challenge, in Pericles; the descended god Jupiter in Cymbeline; and music throughout the comedies, including the music that
is the “food of love” in Orsino's opening speech in Twelfth Night, but that has, by the end of the speech, become “not so sweet
now as it was before.” Battle scenes, like those in the English history plays and in Antony and Cleopatra, are also moments of
high visual interest and onstage action, important to the tenor and pace of the play, and easy to underestimate (or skip over
entirely) if one reads the plays as literature rather than visualizing them as theater.
Since the texts (today we would say “scripts”) of stage plays were not generally regarded as “literature,” many of the rst
published versions of the plays are of uncertain authority. In these years before copyright, rst introduced in England in
1709, authors did not control the printing of their plays. The printer or bookseller took the pro t, and the author sometimes
had little or no opportunity to review or a ect what was published. The editors of the First Folio of Shakespeare make this
very clear in their letter to the readers: “[W]here before you were abused with diverse stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed
and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors that exposed them: even those are now o ered to your view
cured, and perfect of their limbs, and … absolute in their numbers.”
The image of the works of Shakespeare as no longer “maimed” but now “perfect of their limbs” draws an analogy between
the body of the text and the human body. “Numbers” are verses, rhythms, and rhymes. Where previous versions had violated
Shakespeare's meter and distorted his verse, the Folio will correct it, make it “absolute,” or perfect. We should also note that
this same letter “to the great variety of readers” made it quite clear that the First Folio was a commercial venture. The
disparagement of earlier versions of the plays was conjoined with a direct invitation to buy the Folio, the “perfect” version,
published, as the title page declared, “according to the true original copies”:
The fate of all books depends upon your capacities: and not of your heads alone, but of your purses. Well! It is now
public, and you will stand for your privileges, we know: to read, and censure. Do it, but buy it
rst. That doth best
commend a book, the stationer says…. Judge your sixpence worth, your shillings worth, your ve shillings worth at a
time, or higher, for you rise to the just rates, and welcome. But whatever you do, buy.
The plays in the First Folio were therefore prepared as works to be read, reread, and judged. “Read him, therefore; and again,
and again,” urged the editors.
Some of the earlier, “unauthorized” copies have their own liveliness, a freshness that o ers a glimpse of the spirit of this
emerging and transgressive early modern theater. A good example can be found in the much-maligned First Quarto version of
one of Hamlet's most famous speeches:
To be or not to be—I, there's the point,
To Die, to sleep, is that all? I, all:
No, to sleep, to dream, I, mary, there it goes,
For in that dream of death, when we awake,
And borne before an everlasting Judge,
From whence no passenger ever returned,
The undiscovered country, at whose sight
The happy smile, and the accursed damned.
But for this, the joyful hope of this,
Who'd bear the scorns and flattery of the world,
Scorned by the right rich, the rich cursed of the poor?
The widow being oppressed, the orphan wronged,
The taste of hunger, or a tyrant's reign,
And thousand more calamities besides,
To grunt and sweat under this weary life,
When that he his full quietus make,
With a bare bodkin, who would this endure,
But for a hope of something after death?
Which puzzles the brain, and doth confound the sense,
Which makes us rather bear those evils we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of.
I, that, O this conscience makes cowards of us all….
Hamlet, First Quarto, 3.1.60–81
Compare this unfamiliar version to the one that has become canonical, the version, based upon the Folio text and the Second
Quarto (Q2), that generations of poets, students, and actors have learned by heart:
To be, or not to be; that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep—
No more, and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to—'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life,
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of disprized love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action….
Hamlet, First Folio, 3.1.58–90
Undeniably, the poetry of the second passage is more re ective and more compelling. The “sea of troubles,” the ruminative
“To sleep, perchance to dream,” the “undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns” (rather than “at whose
sight / The happy smile, and the accursed damned”)— who could think of doing without them? They are among the
cornerstones of our culture. Yet theatrically these gorgeous philosophical digressions and rich metaphors slow down the
action. The formal “who would,” replacing the more colloquial “who'd,” is a mark of the transition from spoken to written
language. Late-twentieth-century and twenty- rst-century directors, in uenced in part by developments in the modern
theater, have noted the playability of the First Quarto (2,160 lines) as contrasted with the much longer Second Quarto (3,732
lines) and First Folio (ca. 3,500 lines), and experimental productions based upon the First Quarto have been successful with
audiences. Every production is an interpretation, and we are used to directors—both in theater and in lms— rearranging
scenes, shortening speeches, and con ating characters or cutting them altogether. This is part of what directors do as part of
their own craft: “ delity to the text” is balanced with what works on the stage. So it should not come as a surprise, or as a
violation of essential verities, that stage directors should have found the First Quarto, in part because of its unfamiliarity, a
source of theatrical invigoration.
The very centrality of Shakespeare to modern culture has led to a desire to identify and x the “real” Shakespeare, both the
man and the play-text. But the very nature of plays written for performance as well as the conditions of early modern printing
and publication, at a time when the modern concept of copyright was in its nascent form, work against this understandable
wish for authenticity. There are three reasonably authoritative versions of Hamlet (the First Quarto, Second Quarto, and Folio
texts) and two versions of King Lear, a Quarto and a Folio text so di erent from each other that The Norton Shakespeare,
following the editors of the Oxford edition, prints both. Readers have the opportunity to compare di ering versions of
speeches, the assignment of particular lines (who speaks the nal lines, Edgar or Albany?), and whole sections of the plays
that di er crucially from each other. The King Lear known to most mid-twentieth-century students and readers was in fact a
“con ated” text, assembled by editors. That is to say, confronted with two di ering versions of a word, a phrase, a speech, or
a speech assignment, the editor chose the one that made the most sense or the one that struck him as the most
“Shakespearean.” Needless to say, this kind of decision was to a certain extent a self-ful lling prophecy, creating an idea of
“Shakespeare” through editorial decision making. The First Folio version of “To be, or not to be” will doubtless strike most
readers and hearers as more “Shakespearean” than the First Quarto's “To be or not to be—I, there's the point.” But each is in
some way “authentic.” And neither, strictly speaking, was written by Shakespeare.
The First Folio was produced by two of Shakespeare's fellow players, John Heminge and Henry Condell, in 1623, seven years
after Shakespeare's death. The plays, like all plays written for the public stage during this period, were conceived as theatrical
rather than literary vehicles. Some were not published in any form in Shakespeare's lifetime: the quarto of Othello, for
example, was not published until 1622, six years after the playwright's death and only a year before the First Folio, from
which it di ers in hundreds of ways, small and large, from words to passages to punctuation. Certainly, as we have noted,
Shakespeare did not see any of his plays through the press in the way that a modern author might. The real process of
“editing” Shakespeare's works did not take place until centuries later, with the work of the great eighteenth-century editors
from Alexander Pope through Edmond Malone. This is why some Shakespeareans have come to say, in a kind of shorthand,
that although he lived and wrote in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Shakespeare could almost be called an
eighteenth-century author. Many of the textual decisions made in the eighteenth century, where editors “corrected” what
seemed to be Shakespearean infelicities or errors based upon their own literary taste, have come down to us today as part of
the Shakespeare text. Some of the work of modern editors in the twenty- rst century has been to disentangle the often
inspired, occasionally idiosyncratic conjectures from the original if sometimes puzzling phraseology of the quartos published
during Shakespeare's lifetime and the First Folio, printed under the supervision of men who knew him, acted in his plays, and
may have collaborated in their production.
Editing practices have changed a great deal since the time of Shakespeare. As noted above, early modern play texts were
not regarded in the period as “literary” works of art. This is indeed why Ben Jonson was able to disconcert people by
publishing his own plays in 1616 in folio format, with the word “works” on the title page. Plays were not “works”—that
elevated term was reserved for serious writing, like sermons and poems. Plays were more like potboilers or comics. Thomas
Bodley, the founder of the Bodleian Library, the main research library at the University of Oxford, called them “ri -ra ” and
“baggage books,” and ordained that no plays be shelved in his grand new space: even if “some little pro t might be reaped
(which God knows is very little) out of some of our play-books, the bene t thereof will nothing near countervail the harm
that the scandal will bring into the library when it shall be given out that we stuff it full of baggage books….”3
The late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a period in which Shakespeare, though indisputably “great,” was also
judged to be a writer wanting in taste, an unfortunate by-product of a barbarous age. His plays, remarkable though they
were, could be “improved” by more sophisticated modern writers. Thus Nahum Tate's 1681 version of King Lear “improved”
the ending by allowing Lear's daughter Cordelia to live and to marry Edgar. (“Divine Cordelia, all the gods can witness / How
much thy love to Empire I prefer!” Edgar declares at the close.) If this seems idiosyncratic, it was also popular. Tate's was the
only version of Lear performed well into the nineteenth century, even though it was constantly being worked and reworked
by the actors who played the roles. Other plays underwent similar “improvement” in the Restoration period. The Taming of
the Shrew became John Lacy's Sauny the Scot (1667); Antony and Cleopatra was transmuted into Dryden's All for Love; or, The
World Well Lost (1678).
Samuel Johnson, another great eighteenth-century editor, wrote of the task of a “conjectural critic” that
[o]ut of many readings possible, he must be able to select that which best suits with the state, opinion, and modes of
language prevailing in every age, and with his author's particular cast of thought, and turn of expression. Such must be
his knowledge, and such his taste. Conjectural criticism demands more than humanity possesses, and he that exercises it
with most praise has very frequent need of indulgence.4
In other words, the conjectural or emendatory critic was required to make inspired guesses, inserting changes in
Shakespeare's text to conform to his own taste and the taste of the age, replacing what the surviving quartos and folios said
with what Shakespeare should have said—and, it was sometimes claimed, by what he had in fact said, or meant to say. The
early-eighteenth-century editor Nicholas Rowe found in the 1685 Fourth Folio version of The Comedy of Errors a word he saw
was clearly misspelled or misprinted: Lady Adriana, addressing the Duke, describes “Antipholus, my husband, / Whom I made
Lord of me, and all I had, / (At your impotent Letter)” (5.1.138–140). Rowe recognized that “impotent” must be wrong, since
in context Adriana would be explaining that she had taken a husband as a result of the Duke's impotent, or powerless, letters.
Thus, realizing that “impotent letters” gave exactly the reverse sense from what must have been intended, Rowe neatly
corrected this in his 1709 edition by changing “impotent” to “all-potent.” The correct reading, “important letters” (i.e., letters
full of import or of importuning), had to be found by going back to the First Folio, not to the Fourth. “Conjecture has all the
joy and all the pride of invention, and he that has once started a happy change, is too much delighted to consider what
objections may rise against it,” observed Doctor Johnson.5
Two hundred years later, reputable twentieth-century editors were still defending this practice. “Sometimes an inspired
guess gives us with absolute conviction of rightness what Shakespeare must have written, even though we rely on faith and
not on concrete evidence,” wrote Fredson Bowers in 1966. The attraction, and the lure, was a numinous sense of oneness with
the greatest of writers, what seems like a kind of channeling. Thus, pointing to “the old critic Theobald” and his emendation
of the “nonsense” phrase “a Table of green elds,” in the story of Falsta 's death in Henry V, to “a babbl'd of green elds,”
Bowers suggested that Theobald had “what was surely a real meeting of minds with Shakespeare.”6
Improvement, of course, was in the eye, or rather the ear, of the beholder. Even without conjectural editing or other acts of
critical ingenuity, the editors had to select from among the versions o ered by various alternative source texts, quarto or
folio, with the intention of choosing the most felicitous or most melli uous option. One celebrated example from Hamlet was
the rendering of a key adjective in one of the play's most famous speeches, Hamlet's first soliloquy, in act 1, scene 2:
O that this too too —— flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew….
The First and Second Quartos both give “sallied.” The Folio gives “solid.” Editors who do not like “solid” have emended
“sallied” to “sullied.” The modern reader thus has a choice of a word that seems to connote immutable physicality (“too too
solid esh”) or a word that carries the sense of corruption, lth, or wear (“too too sullied esh”). “Sullied,” the preference of
several modern editors, is not present in any of the original printed texts. Which word did Shakespeare write? Early modern
spelling was far from regularized (Shakespeare's own name is spelled in a variety of ways in the period, from Shakespeare to
Shakspere, Shaxspere, and Shaxberd). Even if we knew the answer to the question, that would be only one way of
determining the preferred reading, since at this point both “solid” and, to a lesser extent, “sullied” have themselves become
recognizable cultural phrases with a secondary “authority” born of long usage. To restore “sallied” would be “correct” if one
wished to follow the quartos. But “too too sallied esh” (perhaps esh that had traveled too long, or gone out to ght too
much, in the past?) would have to compete in the Shakespearean marketplace with “sullied” and the popular favorite, “solid.”
It is not that we have no authentic Shakespeare texts, but rather that we have several. From the beginning, “Shakespeare”
was Shakespeares.
Eighteenth-century editors feuded with one another in print, often genially, occasionally acerbically Like biblical
commentary, Shakespeare editing was an additive process, in which rival experts expressed di ering opinions by
rst
summarizing the previous debate. After Othello kills Desdemona, Johnson comments: “I am glad that I have ended my revisal
of this dreadful scene. It is not to be endured.” He describes the death of Cordelia at the end of King Lear in very similar terms,
commending the “improvement” of Nahum Tate's happier ending, in which, as we have noted, Cordelia lives to marry Edgar:
In the present case the publick has decided. Cordelia, from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity.
And, if my sensations could add any thing to the general su rage, I might relate, that I was many years ago so shocked
by Cordelia's death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to
revise them as editor.7
Johnson saw the plays as concerned above all with ethical behavior. The eloquent 1765 “Preface” to his edition of the plays
declared, “Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature,” and asserted with
unparalleled lucid grace that
Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers
a faithful mirrour of manners and of life. His characters are not modi ed by the customs of particular places … by the
peculiarities of studies or professions … or by the accidents of temporary fashions or temporary opinions; they are the
genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always nd…. In the
writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species.8
For this reason he thought that Shakespeare's “real power is not shewn in the splendour of particular passages, but by the
progress of his fable, and the tenour of his dialogue.” It would be an error in judgment to try “to recommend him by select
quotations.”9
But this was not the universal view. The poet Alexander Pope, an early Shakespeare editor whose edition of the plays had
appeared almost forty years before Johnson's, had marked the “beauties” of Shakespeare so that readers could nd them
easily. “Some of the most shining passages are distinguish'd by commas in the margin,” he explained in his preface, “and
where the beauty lay not in particulars but in the whole, a star is pre x'd to the scene.” 10 This practice, of listing “beauties”
and “faults,” was a common feature of eighteenth-century criticism, and it survives in our modern books of quotations.
When applied, as by Pope, to Shakespeare, the listing of “beauties” contributed to a split between regarding the plays as stage
vehicles and as poems.
The Reverend William Dodd's popular collection, The Beauties of Shakespeare: regularly selected from each play, with a
general index, digesting them under proper heads, was published in 1752 and was still available, in pocket-book form, in the
early twentieth century. Dodd dispensed with such niceties as the speaker of the lines and the act, scene, and line numbers by
which the passage could be found. Instead he organized his book by play, and under each play by heading. The section on
All's Well That Ends Well—the rst in the book, since the order was alphabetical rather than chronological—thus contained
selections on “Cowardice,” “Honour due to Personal Virtue only not to Birth,” “Advice to Young Women,” “Life Chequered,”
and “Excuse for Unreasonable Dislike,” among others. Jaques' celebrated set piece in As You Like It was easily ndable under
the title it still carries informally today, “The Seven Ages.” The better-known plays were organized more directly with regard
to plot—”Lady Percy's Pathetic Speech to Her Husband,” “Prince Henry's Modest Defence of Himself,” “Lear on the
Ingratitude of His Daughters”—so that the speaker and even the context were restored, and major characters like Lear,
Antony, and Hamlet could be found in the index among the moral themes. But the focus of the volume, and of its index
(“War, miseries of;” “Wisdom, superior to fortune;” “Women, frailty of”), made it clear that this tiny forerunner of Bartlett's
Familiar Quotations o ered the reader, as its compiler explained in his preface, “so large a fund for observation, and so much
excellent and re ned morality, that no one would have wanted it longer.” Dodd, unfortunately, did not pro t as fully as
perhaps he might have done from this moral compendium of Shakespearean wisdom. Employed as a tutor to the son of Lord
Chester eld, he entertained lavishly and,
nding himself in di culties, rashly forged his patron's signature to a check.
Although Chester eld refused to prosecute, the Lord Mayor of London sent the case to court, and Dodd was found guilty and
sentenced to be hanged.
Despite the unhappy end of the Reverend Mr. Dodd, the vogue for “beauties” of Shakespeare ourished, and pointed in two
directions: toward Shakespeare as poet, and toward Shakespeare as moral arbiter and guide. Both were in some tension with
the idea of Shakespeare as playwright, actor, and man of the theater.
Still, throughout this period, Shakespeare remained a favorite of audiences, and of theater companies. It was the actor
David Garrick, celebrated for his performances as Richard III, Macbeth, and Hamlet, who masterminded the Shakespeare
Jubilee of 1769—and posed for the statue of Shakespeare. Yet the Jubilee, a three-day festival that in essence re-created
Stratford-upon-Avon as “the birthplace of Shakespeare,” was a cultural event (as it happens, a failed one) rather than a
theatrical venue; the planned activities, many of them spoiled by rain, included pageants, parades, reworks, and souvenirs
celebrating the playwright rather than the plays. On the London stage, and increasingly throughout Europe and America,
major actors from Garrick to Kean and Henry Irving produced and starred in versions of the plays. These performances, too,
were often regarded as moral and exemplary, as well as interpretative. Poets continued to attend productions (Keats greatly
admired Kean), but the divide between page and stage, between the sayable and the playable, continued to widen.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century a Romantic critic like Hazlitt could contend without hesitation that the plays
were spoiled by being performed. Romantic writers from Coleridge to Keats engaged with Shakespeare's plays most directly as
a mode of poetry. Coleridge, one of the greatest Shakespeare critics of his own or any era, spoke of Shakespeare largely as a
“poet,” and addressed his remarks to “the readers of Shakespeare.” In a series of highly successful lectures for general
audiences, he contended that “Shakespeare's characters, from Othello and Macbeth down to Dogberry and the Grave-digger,
may be termed ideal realities. They are not the things themselves so much as abstracts of the things which a great mind takes
into itself and then naturalizes them to his own conception.”11 Coleridge saw one of the poet's greatest talents as his ability
to move beyond the topical, and beyond re ections on historical personages. “In the plays of Shakespeare every man sees
himself, without knowing that he does so.”12
Likewise, although Keats took pleasure in the theater, published reviews, and at one time aspired to be a playwright, his
relationship to Shakespeare, expressed in his letters as well as his own poems, was primarily a relation of poet to poet.
“Shakespeare led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it,” he wrote in a letter to his brother and sister-in-law,
George and Georgiana Keats.13 He longed to know in what position Shakespeare sat when he began “To be, or not to be.” In
fact, whether cited, quoted, or used as a model of the poetic life, Shakespeare appears very frequently in Keats's letters, never
more powerfully than in his celebrated notion of negative capability, in which he described his sudden realization, after a
debate with a very de nite-minded friend, of the essential quality “to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature and
which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in
uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”14 A poet, especially a “great poet,”
needs to leave his mind open to ideas and to con icting realities, and the preeminent model for this was Shakespeare. “The
poetical Character” avoids the “egotistical sublime,” Keats wrote in another letter. “It has no character…. It has as much
delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen.”15 Iago is here imagined as the arch-villain. Imogen is the heroine of Cymbeline,
a great favorite of nineteenth-century audiences. This viewpoint is of a piece with Keats's claim that “Shakespeare led a life
of Allegory.” The plays do not re ect the personal opinions, or the moral or political attitudes, of their author. They are
philosophical, but they are not necessarily evidence of Shakespeare's philosophy. Every character, from Iago to that other great
nineteenth-century favorite, Dogberry, is inhabited by the playwright and finds a persona and a voice.
Shakespeare criticism, like all critical interpretation, is, to a certain extent, inevitably contrapuntal. Ideas develop as
commentary and argument. Thus, for example, a claim that the plays should be valued for their ethical and moral
exemplarity begets a counterclaim that the plays are best regarded as close observations of early modern courts, spy networks,
gender relations, and theatrical practice. An interest in historical context will arise to try to qualify some of the universal or
transhistorical claims about what is typically, uniquely, or quintessentially human. A study of the emotions or the passions as
they were understood in the sixteenth century will disclose something surprising about a play that has become assimilated to
modern notions about “human nature.”
In the early twentieth century, the focus by influential critics like A. C.
Bradley on “heroes” and Shakespearean tragedy made tacit claims for the preeminence of plays like Hamlet, Othello, Lear, and
Macbeth, plays that were not necessarily the most highly valued in Shakespeare's own time or since. The universalizing of
these tragic heroes—whose soliloquies produced a sense of interior consciousness rather like Romantic odes and modern lyric
poems— inevitably led to a reaction that insisted upon their cultural speci city, upon categories of identity like race and
class, gender, ethnicity and religion. Through this lens, as we have seen, Othello's pride and anxiety about race and culture
took precedence over his undifferentiated humanness; Shylock's difference from the Christian Venetians was again stressed in
critical interpretation and in performance. Gertrude and Ophelia emerged as major consciousnesses within Hamlet, o ering
other voices and other perspectives to balance the centrality of the title role. In a modern world where “colonialism” became
the shorthand name for both sixteenth-century and nineteenth-and twentieth-century political practices, Caliban, long
viewed as an allegorical gure (“This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine”), seemed to possess, as well, a distinctly
nonallegorical political reality. Just as it became possible to imagine that previously laughable impossibility, “Hamlet without
the prince,” so it became possible to see Caliban as a complex, nuanced figure full of pathos, rage, and untapped power.
Shakespeare's plays are living works of art. Their meanings grow and change as they encounter vivid critical and theatrical
imaginations. When the great Victorian actor Henry Irving died, the Times of London wrote glowingly about his
interpretations of Shakespearean characters from Hamlet to Shylock and Coriolanus, many of which were “hotly” debated in
the period. Irving's Macbeth, the paper reported, had been especially controversial: “It seems a little surprising now, in a
generation which accepts Macbeth as a poet, a ‘man of letters manqué,' that such fierce storms should have been raised by the
view that he was a moral coward.”16 The idea of Macbeth as a “man of letters manqué” would perhaps surprise some twentyrst-century audiences. Peter Brook's landmark production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre
in 1970 transformed the play, taking what had been a vehicle for gauzy sets and lambent lighting and transforming it into a
white space with toys and a trapeze. But before him, Max Reinhardt in Germany had sensed something else about the Dream,
something dark and dangerous. When Reinhardt came to Hollywood in the years before World War II, he made a lm of A
Midsummer Night's Dream, with Mickey Rooney as Puck and Joe E. Brown as Flute, that told another story about the play.
With the advent of
lm versions, the multiplicity of interpretations is something every spectator expects. Olivier's Hamlet,
Kenneth Branaghs Hamlet, Franco Ze relli and Mel Gibson's Hamlet could not be more di erent, but they are all
“Shakespeare's” Hamlet (although the Ze relli production starring Gibson displayed the name of the director in print larger
than that of the playwright). Film versions of Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, and Twelfth Night are seen by more
spectators in an evening than some of Shakespeare's plays were during his lifetime.
If productions have changed readings, criticism and theory have also in uenced productions. The 1921 silent
lm of
Hamlet, with Danish actress Asta Nielsen in the title role, was based upon the writings of Victorian critic E. P. Vining.
Laurence Olivier's Hamlet, emphasizing the passionate relationship between Hamlet and his mother, and declaring itself the
“tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind,” was strongly in ected by the work of Sigmund Freud. Postcolonial
readings of The Tempest helped shape a number of important productions in the 1990s, while a roster of adaptations, from
Bertolt Brecht's Coriolanus and Aimé Césaire's Une Tempête to lms like O and Scot-land, PA, have stretched the boundaries of
“Shakespearean” drama. The strength of the plays, the evidence of what we call their “greatness,” is their capacity to be
reinterpreted, reread, and performed anew in every generation.
BIOGRAPHY AND AUTHORSHIP
William Shakespeare was born in 1564 and died in 1616. His birth date is said to have been April 23—which is also, as it
happens, the date of his death, and is, in addition, Saint George's Day, the holiday of England's patron saint. This detail alone
gives some idea of the mythic status that Shakespeare seems to have achieved, or which has developed around him. He was
brought up in the market town of Stratford-upon-Avon, where his father, John Shakespeare, was a glover, a wool merchant,
and the baili , or mayor, of the town. His mother's name was Mary Arden. William was one of eight children. Several of his
siblings died in childhood, a common occurrence in the period. He was very probably educated at the Stratford grammar
school, where he seems to have gotten a good classical education, centering on the study of Latin texts, like Ovid's
Metamorphoses, Virgil's Aeneid, and the plays of Plautus. In his memorial poem for Shakespeare in the First Folio, Ben Jonson
says he had “small Latin and less Greek,” but this may tell us more about the learned Jonson than it does about Shakespeare.
Most of Shakespeare's plays have sources, although what he borrowed, he transformed. As Walter Savage Landor wrote—in
a passage that Emerson quoted in his own essay on quotation—Shakespeare “was more original than his originals. He
breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life.”17 We should bear in mind that the notion of “originality” in this
period was quite di erent from the modern sense of something never seen before, a sense that gained ascendancy in the
eighteenth century in works like Edward Young's Conjectures on Original Composition (1759). In the Renaissance, the notion
of inventio, with its etymological root in “ nding,” referred to the discovery, by search or endeavor, of ideas or images that
could be used in rhetoric. Shakespeare's plays draw on classical mythology, historical chronicle (Plutarch's Parallel Lives in
the 1579 translation by Sir Thomas North; English and Scottish chronicles by Edward Hall, John Stow, and Raphael
Holinshed), the writings of his contemporaries (including Elizabethan novels, plays by other authors, and verse), and the
Bible. Shakespeare's Bible was usually the 1560 translation known as the Geneva Bible, a version so popular that it went
through 122 editions between 1560 and 1611. The Geneva Bible was issued in quarto form, and was thus easy to consult. It
was also the rst Bible to be fully numbered by chapter and verse. The other Bible Shakespeare is thought perhaps to have
used is the Bishops' Bible, published in folio in 1568, but this version never attained the popularity of the Geneva Bible. The
so-called King James Bible, commissioned by the monarch, was produced by a team of scholars in 1611, too late to have been
Shakespeare's reference text in his earlier plays, although its poetry, and its ubiquity, had a profound e ect upon virtually all
subsequent English authors.
At the age of eighteen, Will Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, who was twenty-six years old and already pregnant with
their
rst child, Susanna. This, too, is a not-unusual fact about sixteenth-century life. The themes of pregnancy before
marriage, and of precontract, or marriages without o cial sanction of clergy, recur in a number of his plays, principally in
Measure for Measure. Shakespeare and his wife also had twins, a boy and a girl, Hamnet and Judith; Hamnet died young, at
the age of eleven, in 1596, after Shakespeare had moved to London to pursue his career. Shakespeare was an actor as well as a
poet and playwright. He was a shareholder in one of the most successful—and well-managed— companies of his day,
working collaboratively with other actors, two of whom, John Heminge and Henry Condell, would survive him and compile
the First Folio of his works.
The fact that Shakespeare lived in London for so much of his life, and seems to have moved back to Stratford only at the
end, has occasioned a good deal of speculation about his marriage. In his will he left his wife his “second-best bed,” a legacy
that may or may not suggest a lack of a ection. The curiosity of scholars on this point, which has extended, for example, to
an argument that the “second-best” bed was the marital bed, the rst-best being reserved for guests, is an indication of how
very much every piece of Shakespeare history and legend has been mined for what it might reveal about Shakespeare the
man. The will emerges as a signi cant document in the relative absence of other personal evidence. Although there is as
much of a “paper trail” for Shakespeare as for many other early modern writers, his subsequent celebrity has been such that
readers have sought, and demanded, more.
We do not have personal letters, diaries, or commonplace books written by Shakespeare. This, combined with the sheer
volume of the plays and their magni cent language, has led some people to speculate that he could not be their author.
Surely, they say, it must have been somebody of a higher social status (like the Earl of Oxford) or a lawyer (like Sir Francis
Bacon) or someone who knew the court (Queen Elizabeth herself has been suggested). This so-called Authorship Controversy,
a minor wrinkle in Shakespeare studies, has been a persistent object of fascination, in part because it suggests that we might
like the plays to transcend individual authorship entirely; it seems we want to make Shakespeare less like a man, and more
like a kind of god. As one early commentator on the controversy asked, how could one person know so many words?18
Shakespeare has been credited with the invention of thousands of new words in English. In practice many of these new
words are actually new grammatical uses for existing words—nouns made into verbs and verbs made into nouns. And of
course the survival of the plays, and the celebrity of their author, made Shakespeare the apparent inventor, whether or not he
was the real one. When in the late nineteenth century the editors of the new Oxford English Dictionary put out a call for “men
of letters” to assist them in their task of nding the histories of words, volunteers combed the books on their shelves and in
their local libraries, often identifying Shakespeare as the point of origin. Since the dictionary, which was to be organized “on
historical principles,” was intended to “make a dictionary worthy of the English language,” the historical trail often led back