How have approaches to Shakespeare changed over the years? A look at the Arden Shakespeare—the First Series was completed in 1924; the Third, earlier this year—provides some surprising answers, Paul Dean writes in The New Criterion:

In many respects, the most radical changes from one edition to another occur where a reader least notices them: in the punctuation of the text. Punctuation marks were used differently in Shakespeare’s day from the way we use them, and the early printings reflect the punctuation of the compositors rather than that of the manuscript they were setting, which in any case may not have been Shakespeare’s. Punctuation affects the movement, tempo, and weight of an actor’s delivery, and hence the color of an entire exchange or scene. The ‘same’ text in Arden 2 and Arden 3 may have completely different punctuation, which reflects the editor’s judgment of how the lines might be spoken. Thus, Claudio’s famous soliloquy on the terror of death (Measure for Measure, Act 3, scene 1) begins, in Arden 2: ‘Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;/ To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot.’ In Arden 3, we have, ‘Ay, but to die and go we know not where,/ To lie in cold obstruction and to rot.’ The heavier punctuation in Arden 2 brings out the nervous hesitancy with which Claudio imagines the terrible experience, while that in Arden 3 suggests an element of headlong panic. The effect in performance would be quite different. (Arden 2 follows the Folio, except that it puts a semi-colon where the Folio puts a comma.)

In contrast to Hart’s twenty-eight pages, Lever’s introduction to Measure for Measure occupies ninety-eight, while Braunmuller and Watson take 148. This is typical of Arden 3 as a whole; the introductions have grown longer and longer. Certain topics remain compulsory—chronology, for example . . . The approach to bibliographical matters, as noted above, had been completely transformed by the time of Arden 2 . . . In the Arden 3 Measure for Measure, interpretation takes pride of place in the introduction, technical matters coming later. Perhaps surprisingly, themes and character study remain, despite much scorn for both in the heyday of literary theory. The stage history, in a return to earlier practice, takes a mere six pages (contrast the fifty allotted to this in the Arden 3 Twelfth Night, 2008). The most radical departure is the discussion of authorship: for Measure for Measure is now among the Shakespeare plays in which a share is claimed for Thomas Middleton (more on this shortly). Theories of multiple authorship, which were popular during the lifetime of Arden 1 but largely dismissed as ‘disintegrationist’ in the years when Arden 2 was appearing, are now back in fashion.

In other news: Brian Greene’s Until the End of Time is the latest book to attempt to explain the mind by reducing it to the brain. Edward Feser is having none of it: “The basic metaphysical assumption is a crude reductionism: All that really exists, we are assured, are basic particles governed by mathematical laws.  Hence consciousness, free will, etc. must somehow either be reduced without remainder to these, or eliminated from our picture of reality. The problem Greene wants to solve in the chapter is to explain how this program can most plausibly be carried out. There are three main difficulties with Greene’s solution to the problem.  First, the solution is a non-starter, because second, he doesn’t understand the problem in the first place.  But third, it doesn’t matter, because the reductionistic assumption that creates the problem isn’t true anyway.”

Cheever’s God: “Even those who knew Cheever and had some sense of his contradictions were surprised by the journals. ‘They tell me more about Cheever’s lusts and failures and self-humiliations and crushing sense of shame and despond,’ John Updike wrote, ‘than I can easily reconcile with my memories of the sprightly, debonair, gracious man, often seen on the arm of his pretty, witty wife.’ But perhaps the greatest surprise was Cheever’s deep religious feeling. Time and again, we find him seeking consolation at his village’s Episcopal church, moved by the sight of the Eucharist, consoled by the words of the Creed. ‘If my hands tremble with desire,’ he wrote, ‘they tremble likewise when I reach for the chalice on Sunday, and if lust makes me run and caper it is no stronger a force than that which brings me to my knees to say thanksgivings and litanies.’ What was the nature of Cheever’s belief?”

Every couple of years someone revisits the work of William McGonagall, billed as the worst poet in the English language. The latest to do so is Matthew Sherrill, but he finds something redeeming in McGonagall: “There have been worse poets, of course, and as such it would be more accurate to describe McGonagall as the worst famous poet in the English language, a testament in part to the man’s powers of self-promotion and the caprices of literary history. But McGonagall’s notoriety still owes much to the singularly strange power of his own badness. There’s something, I think, in poems like ‘The Tay Bridge Disaster’—as well as McGonagall’s many poems on his great themes of death and destruction—that is worth examining; something that might redeem him, ever so slightly, from the annals of amusing semi-obscurity; something unsettling about his ostensibly blinkered artistic vision that might help to account for why he lingers as the patron saint of misbegotten verse.”

Every city looks and feels the same, Darran Anderson argues in The Atlantic. “Glass-and-steel monoliths replaced local architecture. It’s not too late to go back.”

Edith Wharton’s refuges: “Wharton’s fiction is replete with outbuildings like the deserted house, often frequented by lovers or would-be lovers. In The Age of Innocence (1920), Ellen Olenska and Newland Archer meet in a small house on the edge of a large estate in winter so they can talk furtively. In Summer (1917), Charity Royall and Lucius Harney meet nightly for sex and tea in an abandoned house in the Massachusetts woods that they make roughly habitable. In The House of Mirth (1905), Lily Bart and Lawrence Selden kiss in the conservatory of a New York mansion, outside of a crowded ball. Her characters are drawn to such places, in part because there is no refuge to be found at home. These makeshift refuges provide temporary moments of privacy, intimacy, and escape in a world of houses that fail to be homes.”

Photo: Svolvær  

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