Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist

Contents:

Introduction

Part I: Publication
1 The Legitimation of Printed Playbooks in Shakespeare's Time
2 The Making of "Shakespeare"
3 Shakespeare and the Publication of His Plays (I): The Late Sixteenth Century
4 Shakespeare and the Publication of His Plays (II): The Early Seventeenth Century
5 The Players' Alleged Opposition to Print

Part II: Texts
6 Why Size Matters: "The Two Hours' Traffic of Our Stage" and the Length of Shakespeare's Plays
7 Editorial Policy and the Length of Shakespeare's Plays
8 "Bad Quartos" and Their Origins: Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, and Hamlet
9 Theatricality, Literariness, and the Texts of Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, and Hamlet

Appendices
Appendix A: The Plays of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries in Print, 1583-1623
Appendix B: Heminge and Condell's "Stolne, and Surreptitious Copies" and the Pavier Quartos
Appendix C: Shakespeare and the Circulation of Dramatic Manuscripts

Select Bibliography


Summary:

This study argues that Shakespeare, apart from being a playwright who wrote theatrical texts for the stage, was also a literary dramatist who produced reading texts for the page. The usual distinction that has been set up between Ben Jonson on the one hand, carefully preparing his manuscripts for publication, and Shakespeare the man of the theatre, writing for his actors and and audience, indifferent to his plays as literature, is questioned in this book. Examining the evidence from early published playbooks, this study argues that Shakespeare wrote many of his plays with a readership in mind and that these "literary" texts would have been abridged for the stage because they were too long for performance. The variant early texts of Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, and Hamlet are shown to reveal important insights into the different media for which Shakespeare designed his plays.


Reviews:

The year's best book on Shakespeare
Jonathan Bate, The Times Literary Supplement (5 December 2003)

An exceedingly learned book … I must say I found this mustered evidence and these arguments completely gripping.
James Fenton, The New York Review of Books (8 April 2004)

Among the most significant works of Shakespearean scholarship in recent years
MacDonald Jackson, University of Auckland

Lukas Erne's new book is certainly one of the most fascinating, thought-provoking, and lucid studies of Shakespeare I can remember reading.
Robert C. Evans, Ben Jonson Journal

Lukas Erne's brilliant new book ... sets out probably the most exhilarating change in our image of Shakespeare as a writer for decades. ... Erne is brilliant at reconsidering evidence, taking a quizzical view of comments and facts that we had understood in one way for so long that we had forgotten to keep asking whether they could be read in other and better ways. It is the work of a scholar who here and in the years to come has a vast amount to teach us about Shakespeare, making him new, just as every performance makes the particular play new.
Peter Holland, McMeel Family Professor in Shakespeare Studies, University of Notre Dame

The notion is familiar. Shakespeare -- actor, playwright, man of the theatre -- was a producer of scripts, devoted to their production in the playhouse, but indifferent to their appearance in print. Lukas Erne challenges this notion, with a persuasive picture of a Shakespeare conscious of having been read and reread, excerpted and anthologized; a writer writing with a readership in mind. Erne's book, which draws together the recent isolated conclusions of a number of scholars, builds on their foundations a more radical thesis, and makes it difficult to see how so many of us could have been taken in for so long by the unlikely image of a jobbing playwright.
Nicholas Robins, The Times Literary Supplement (7 November 2003)

[Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist] will certainly change our future discourse about dramatic texts and about Shakespeare
Richard Knowles, Modern Philology
 
[Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist] will serve to set new directions for Renaissance scholarship
Andrew Murphy, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England

An excellent and scrupulously researched book ... this may well, then, be one of those rare books that changes how Shakespeare is perceived and edited.
Colin Burrow, Shakespeare Quarterly

Erne achieves nothing less than the complete undoing of our understanding of Shakespeare as author
Dympna Callaghan, Studies in English Literature

Erne's book is marvellously researched, meticulously annotated, sensitively illustrated, and delivered in clear, refulgent prose ... its conclusions are so engaging that its arguments will become well known by a generation or more of Shakespeareans.
Kevin de Ornellas, New Theatre Quarterly

An important book whose careful engagement with difficult questions and often conflicting evidence will command serious attention in Shakespearian scholarship.
Lawrence Manley, Renaissance Journal

to be welcomed as a long-overdue demonstration that Shakespeare wrote for both the stage and the page ... ought to have a most beneficial influence on Shakespeare scholarship and criticism.
Brian Vickers, Modern Language Review

Lukas Erne's lively and erudite book is of considerable importance for theatre historians. ... The book brings together theatrical and literary history, textual studies and issues central to our conception both of Shakespeare (the author, actor and businessman) and 'Shakespeare' (the cultural entity'). Erne's exposition of issues in complex debates is exemplary, and his method of proceeding is methodical and clear.
Russell Jackson, Theatre Notebook

Easily the most important contribution to the field this year – indeed the most important contribution for a long time.
Gabriel Egan, Year’s Work in English Studies

This is an ambitious book which convincingly rewrites theatre history, textual criticism, and the relation between the two. Of interest to all scholars of Shakespeare and Renaissance drama, the argument shows Erne to be as fine a literary critic as he is a textual scholar and theatre historian. This is essential reading for all Renaissance graduate courses, for those who care about the workings of the Elizabethan theatre and the book trade, and for those who are interested in the evolution of literary status and authorship.
Laurie Maguire, Magdalen College, Oxford University

Lukas Erne's Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist is a book for the new century. Boldly arguing that Shakespeare became a dramatic author during his own lifetime, the book constitutes a third phase of modern bibliography. If in the early twentieth century W. W. Greg longed to produce a text he thought Shakespeare had written, and at the end of the century the Oxford editors produced a text they thought Shakespeare had performed, Erne shows decisively that Shakespeare and his acting companies produced playtexts for both performance and publication, on stage and on page, for the playhouse and the printing house. Thus, Erne's Shakespeare is precisely a man of the theatre who became a literary dramatist, at once concerned with the next performance and his own literary reputation. Lucidly cast, and carefully researched, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist will be an important study in the ongoing attempt to recover the original historical conditions under which Shakespeare's plays were written, performed, and printed.
Patrick Cheney, Pennsylvania State University

Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist is an unusually lively and provocative book exploring the status of printed drama in Shakespeare's England. Erne forces a welcome rethinking of many of the most confidently held assumptions about early modern literary culture, as he powerfully re-examines the interests of theatre companies, the operations of the book trade, the activities of early readers, and, perhaps most consequentially, Shakespeare's own literary understanding and ambitions.
David Scott Kastan, Columbia University

Anyone who has suspected that Shakespeare wrote for the page as well as the stage will want to read this eloquent and convincing book. Lukas Erne has worked through a mountain of evidence, thoughtfully and thoroughly, to reconsider the received idea that Shakespeare was indifferent to the survival of his work.
Ruth Morse, Université Paris 7

One of the greater ironies of Shakespeare scholarship over the last century is the ongoing effort by Shakespeare scholars - most of whom spend dozens of hours a week enjoining, cajoling, and browbeating their students into addressing Shakespeare's plays as literature - to deny that those plays are literature. Shakespeare, these scholars say, thought of his plays as disposable, populist ephemera, like Hollywood scripts; they were created for performance, and that's all. Views, interpretations, editions, or theoretical schools which posit a reader are, by this thinking, sadly and anachronistically missing the point.
It is especially surprising, given the hegemony and orthodoxy of the 'performance'- based position among the adept (countered by the occasional plaintive voice in the literary wilderness), that the position is grounded almost entirely on assertions from absence: there's no known evidence that Shakespeare was actively involved in the publication of his plays. But as Lukas Erne demonstrates in Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, there is a large body of convincing evidence showing that Shakespeare was writing not just for players and playgoers, but for readers as well. Erne calls upon every relevant study and scholar of note over the last century (he does not duck the tough questions) to demonstrate that:

• Dramatic literature was rapidly gaining respectability in the 1590s, long before that widely-supposed watershed, Jonson's 1616 publication of his Workes. Plays for the public theatres (with Shakespeare's predominant) were widely quoted in poetic miscellanies and commonplace books starting in the 1590s, for instance, in company with the brightest literary lights of the day.
• Between 1594 and 1603, every Shakespeare play that was not somehow precluded (by, for instance, a stationer's company entry for a similar play) was in fact published -- generally about two years after the plays' stage debuts. Erne posits an intentional strategy by The Chamberlain's Men to get Shakespeare's plays into print.
• Shakespeare's long plays were far too long to have been played uncut in the public theatres, and were far longer than those of his contemporaries. Only Ben Jonson, that most self-consciously literary of playwrights, compares. Erne's cogent re-analysis of Alfred Hart's 1930s data on the length of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays effectively addresses the critiques of Hart's analysis by Steven Urkowitz and others.
• Longer plays -- Shakespeare's and others' -- were regularly cut for performance, just as they are today.
• The short quartos are representations -- however mangled -- of such performances.

Among many arguments (which were there time and space enough, I would detail here), I will mention here Erne's explication in his final chapter of the theatrical nature of the short quartos of Romeo, Hamlet, and Henry V. He shows the hand of a skilled theatrical abridger at work, surgically excising flowery and purple 'literary' material, and reworking the remainder for the benefit of players and playgoers. To cite one example, he shows that all the scattered references to Hamlet's sea voyage (which no auditor could dream of piecing together while watching a play -- only a careful reader could do so) are absent in Q1, with all the information conveniently condensed into the only added scene in the quarto, between Gertrude and Horatio. Appendix A, 'The Plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in print, 1584-1623,' is an intelligently designed, information-packed table, sufficient reason in its own right for having this volume to hand. Other tables throughout the volume are equally useful.
Steve Roth, Early Modern Literary Studies