<i>Early Shakespeare, 1588–1594</i>. Edited by Rory Loughnane and Andrew J. Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. v+324.

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewEarly Shakespeare, 1588–1594. Edited by Rory Loughnane and Andrew J. Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. v+324.Warren ChernaikWarren ChernaikUniversity of London Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe title of this book is in many respects misleading. A more appropriate title would have been “Collaboration in the Early Shakespeare.” The approach of this collection of essays is clearly set forth in MacDonald P. Jackson’s essay “Shakespeare’s Early Verse Style”: “Computer-aided techniques of author identification have revolutionized studies in attribution… . It has become increasingly clear that in the beginnings of his career Shakespeare collaborated with other playwrights. Early Shakespeare is being redefined” (102). Gary Taylor, Rory Loughnane, and Jackson are among the many authors in this volume also represented in The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion (2017). Taylor and Loughnane wrote the book-length account of “The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare’s Plays” in the Authorship Companion, to which the present volume may be seen as a complement, even a sequel. Late Shakespeare, edited by Power and Loughnane (Cambridge University Press, 2012), follows a more conventional pattern, with essays on seven plays, starting with Pericles, and seven more essays on general topics, such as magic, Shakespeare and James I, and the actors of the King’s Men, Shakespeare’s acting company. In Early Shakespeare, nearly half of the volume is concerned with a single play, Arden of Faversham, not considered as part of the Shakespeare canon before the New Oxford Shakespeare, and several significant works of Shakespeare’s early career (The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, even Edward III, another recent addition to the Shakespeare canon) are treated only briefly. If a reader would be interested in the relationship between the early comedies and the later comedies of Shakespeare, or between Titus Andronicus and later tragedies, or would search for the words “revenge” or “Seneca” or “New Comedy” or even “the history play,” he would find virtually nothing, though all previous accounts of “the early Shakespeare” give these topics prominence. Computer-aided technology plays a central role in Early Shakespeare, while theatrical history (as the extraordinarily skimpy bibliography at the end of the volume shows) has a limited role. The choice of 1594 as the cutoff date for “early Shakespeare” is a reasonable one, since that is the year Shakespeare’s association with the Chamberlain’s Men is generally assumed to have begun, but the choice of that date could have allowed for more discussion of the theatrical companies for which Shakespeare might have written these early plays and in which he might have acted, rather than treating the plays as printed texts suitable for analysis as data.The best essays in this uneven collection do not place much emphasis on collaboration and do not seek to “redefine” Shakespeare in a way that purports to be scientific, “big data” uncontaminated by human hands. Goran Stanivukovic’s excellent “The Language and Style of Early Shakespeare,” comparative in approach, looks in close detail at formal properties of language and style in passages in works by Shakespeare and some of his contemporaries. In this rich, carefully argued essay, Stanivukovic treats both what the early Shakespeare shares with his contemporary dramatists like Christopher Marlowe and Robert Greene and ways in which his use of language differs from theirs. In sensitive detailed commentary on passages from True Tragedy (the Octavo version of 3 Henry VI), Richard III, The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Venus and Adonis, he demonstrates the flexibility and effectiveness of an early Shakespearean style that makes full use of the devices of classical rhetoric, as reflected in Renaissance rhetorical manuals like Henry Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence (1577). A second fine essay, Andy Kessen’s “John Lyly and Shakespeare’s Early Career,” is also aware of the complex interrelationship of Shakespeare’s early comedies with plays by his contemporaries and predecessors. A dramatist active in the 1580s, a period for which relatively few plays are extant, Lyly wrote his comedies for children’s companies and, as Kessen shows convincingly, had a significant influence not only on such plays as Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love’s Labour’s Lost, but on later comedies by Shakespeare. Lyly’s prose romance Euphues remained extraordinarily popular throughout this period, reaching its eleventh edition in 1597. Another essay by a theatrical historian, Andrew Power’s “Boy Parts in Early Shakespeare,” is full of useful information about rehearsal practices and the staging requirements of particular plays and shows complete mastery of its field of inquiry. In this early period, as later with the Chamberlain’s Men, Power argues for a system of apprenticeship, with parts assigned of gradually increasing complexity. A young boy, playing a part like Moth in Love’s Labour’s Lost or young Rutland in 3 Henry VI, would in the course of time be ready for such long and complex roles as Juliet.Among the essays treating Arden of Faversham, the best by far is MacDonald Jackson’s “Shakespeare’s Early Verse Style,” which compares passages from that play, Titus Andronicus, and Venus and Adonis to show that these three passages “must be by a single author” (102). Jackson has long argued that Arden of Faversham, scenes 4–9, are by Shakespeare, with the rest of the play by an unknown second author, and this essay, using computer-aided searches for particular words and phrases (n-grams), provides further evidence in support of that position, clearly set forth in detail. Titus Andronicus is another work that has been shown to be collaborative, with at least act 1 by Peele, and here as in Edward III and Arden of Faversham, “the early Shakespeare’s style can be detected in certain sections, but not in others” (113). Terri Bourus’s “Arden of Faversham, Richard Burbage, and the Early Shakespeare Canon,” thoughtful and lively, but flawed, treats the play from a theatrical standpoint, based in part on the experience of directing a production. Recognizing that Alice Arden is an unusually long and complex part for a boy actor, the essay then goes on to speculate, without a shred of evidence, that Richard Burbage might possibly, at the age of eighteen or twenty, have acted longish boy’s parts and that Shakespeare, aware of this, might have decided to write the play, or some of it, for him. Laurie Maguire’s “Early Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Narrative Theory” builds some interesting castles in the air around the fact that a character in Arden of Faversham named Franklin tells tales “about sovereignty in marriage” (122) in some ways resembling Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale, to argue that Franklin, Arden’s friend and confidant, is an unreliable narrator, rather than giving Arden sound advice. Finally, Harriet Archer’s “Poetry, Counsel, and Coercion in Shakespeare’s Early History Plays” provides a painful object lesson in how a potentially valuable essay can fall apart when a process of peer review has not been properly applied. How could any independent reader of a draft of this essay not have noticed that the essay consistently uses the word “coercion” as synonymous with “persuasion” or that Arden of Faversham is not an example of “Shakespeare’s early history plays”?Two essays on the chronology of early Shakespeare by Loughnane and Will Sharpe, as well as the introduction by the editors, “Beginning with Shakespeare,” are disappointing in their excessive dependence on lists and charts and on the more detailed treatment of this topic by Taylor and Loughnane in the Authorship Companion. Sharpe’s “Collaboration and Shakespeare’s Early Career” tells us, clearly enough, what other scholars have said about the possible order of the plays and about collaboration, though nothing in his account has not been said before, with more detailed arguments, in the Authorship Companion. His essay and Loughnane’s contain many charts, and I would question how useful parallel columns for Taylor 1987, Taylor 2005, Wiggins, and “Alternative,” with a separate chart comparing Taylor 2005 and Taylor/Loughnane 2017, will be to readers of the volume. Loughnane’s list of “Surviving London Playhouse Plays from the 1580s,” with dates of performance, authors (including Anon.), titles, and dates of publication, on the other hand, is genuinely illuminating, since it situates Shakespeare’s plays, including those in which he may have a coauthor, among those of his contemporaries. I would prefer more emphasis than either of these essays give on the distinction between what has now become an agreed consensus among scholars, differing from earlier views, as compared to plays in which scholars still differ strongly in their conclusions. The first category includes plays in which Shakespeare seems to have revised a preexisting drama (Edward III, 1 Henry VI, possibly Arden of Faversham) and plays in which he worked from the outset with a collaborator (Titus Andronicus), while the second includes plays in which the date or the extent of the collaboration, if any, is open to question (Two Gentlemen of Verona, Richard III, The Taming of the Shrew, 2 Henry VI, 3 Henry VI). If Taylor and Loughnane, alone among recent scholars, assign dates before 1590 to Arden of Faversham, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Titus Andronicus—or if indeed, as Sharpe suggests, all the plays in the Shakespeare canon before 1594 are collaborative (70)—I would like to see arguments supporting these assertions. Surely the discrepancy between proposed dates of 1588 and 1594 for Two Gentlemen needs detailed discussion.Essays by Taylor, John Jowett, and John Nance discuss the plays presenting the knottiest problems in the early Shakespeare canon, 2 and 3 Henry VI and The Taming of the Shrew. These problems arise since there evidently were two versions of each of these plays circulating in the 1590s, published under different titles and performed by different companies. Nance’s “Early Shakespeare and the Authorship of The Taming of the Shrew” recognizes that the existence of the anonymous A Shrew, published in 1594 with a title page stating that it had been “acted sundry times by the … Earle of Pembrooke his servants,” complicates any attempt to discuss collaborative authorship of The Shrew. The traditional view of A Shrew, as of the rival versions of 2 and 3 Henry VI—The Contention (1594) and The True Tragedy (1595), also acted before 1594 by Pembroke’s Men—is that all these plays are Bad Quartos, defective, inauthentic texts that were the result of memorial reconstruction by actors. But recent criticism has been skeptical of the Bad Quarto theory, seeing these plays as independent texts deserving scrutiny in their own right, so that rather than 3 Henry VI being a play written before 1594, from which the corrupt text of The True Tragedy was derived, or The Shrew being the play from which A Shrew was adapted, the Quarto or Octavo texts came first and the versions included in the First Folio (1623) were later revisions. One major weakness of the Bad Quarto theory as applied to these three plays is that all these plays contain significant passages that are completely different in the Quarto/Octavo and the Folio versions, with differences that could not possibly be the product of faulty memory.1 Taylor and Loughnane in the Authorship Companion accept authorial revision in 2 and 3 Henry VI, though not in The Shrew, as does Taylor’s essay in this collection, which argues that Marlowe is coauthor of The Contention, an earlier version of 2 Henry VI. Jowett in “The Origins of Richard Duke of York,” in contrast, recycles Bad Quarto theories, arguing that the Octavo version does not represent “the original collaborative play” (255), but is a corrupt text contaminated by memorial reconstruction, with some passages by an unidentified third author.2Nance’s attempt to prove that Marlowe is coauthor of The Taming of the Shrew, responsible for the subplot, and Shakespeare the Katherina/Petruchio “taming” plot, suffers from several methodological weaknesses. Nance uses a method of “micro-attribution” in comparing two passages from the “taming” plot and two from the subplot, of 173 words each, claiming that a sample of this size is “large enough to correctly identify an author” of a contested passage (267). But this claim is absurd, since the sample size is too small to prove anything: any other passage as tiny as 173 words could be chosen at random for the comparison and would produce different results. Lines from Katherina’s speech in the final scene, famous for its misogyny, are compared with a passage from act 1, an exchange between the young Lucentio and his servant Tranio, to reach the not exactly surprising conclusion that they have nothing in common, and that lines like “Or so devote to Aristotle’s checks / Or Ovid be an outcast quite abjured” resemble passages in Doctor Faustus more than “Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper.” Even if a search on a database shows more “unique parallels” with Marlowe than with Shakespeare, that does not prove that Marlowe wrote a particular passage: no considerations other than the counting of numbers (multiplied by some form of magic, so that the same two words can reappear as bigrams, trigrams, and collocations in the word count) enter into the discussion. “Unique parallels” in this database of plays, 1576–94, supposedly proving Marlowe’s authorship, include such phrases as “come ashore,” “common talk,” and “do admire.”Except for the essays by Jackson, Taylor, and Nance, none of the essays in this collection advance arguments for the claims of coauthorship in Arden of Faversham, 2 Henry VI, and 3 Henry VI, but accept these claims as a given, already demonstrated. This suggests one of the weaknesses in this volume, as in the Authorship Companion: that rather than representing a diversity of views and approaches, Early Shakespeare is, to an appreciable extent, the work of a closed circle, united ideologically.Notes1. For detailed arguments that the differences between A Shrew and The Shrew can only be explained by authorial revision rather than memorial reconstruction, see Leah Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (New York: Routledge, 1996), 101–31; and Warren Chernaik, “Shakespeare at Work: Four Kings and Two Shrews,” Cahiers Élisabéthains 85 (May 2014): 21–39.2. The case against seeing The True Tragedy as a Bad Quarto is set forth in King Henry VI, Part 3, ed. John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001), 159–66. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 118, Number 3February 2021 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/711883 Views: 270 HistoryPublished online October 30, 2020 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected] Crossref reports no articles citing this article.