Journal of Early Modern Studies, n. 5 (2016), pp. 261-274
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/JEMS-2279-7149-18092
ISSN 2279-7149 (online)
www.fupress.com/bsfm-jems
2016 Firenze University Press
‘mere prattle without practice’:
Authorship in Performance
Thomas Betteridge
Brunel University London (<thomas.betteridge@brunel.ac.uk>)
Gregory Thompson
University College London (<gregory.thompson@ucl.ac.uk>)
Abstract
Over the last ten years there has been a struggle within Shakespeare studies between the vast
majority of scholars who have remained committed to the orthodox view on Shakespeare’s
authorship of the plays that bear his name and a much smaller group of scholars, working with
profoundly different levels of rigour, who have sought to question this position. Recently there
has been a degree of agreement that it is more productive to approach the issue in terms of
acknowledging the collaborative nature of early modern play writing. It is noticeable, however,
that for the literary critics and historians involved in this debate collaboration seems to end at
the playhouse’s door. There is an assumption that the collaborators who produced early modern
drama were all writers and not the other people involved in the production of Tudor and Stuart
plays. This is profoundly problematic. In this article, Thomas Betteridge and Greg Thompson
propose a non-textual approach to the authorship question through the use of performance as a
research technique. The first part of the article will map out the current ground of Shakespeare
authorship studies while the second part is an account of a performance as research workshop
carried out by Betteridge and Thompson with students from Brunel University, London.
Keywords: Authorship, Performance, Reading, Shakespeare, Workshop
Why to the Hermit letters should be sent,
To post Skinke to the court incontinent:
Is there no tricke in this? Ha let me see?
Or doe they know already I am he?
(Anonymous, Look About You, 1.1.49-52)
1. Introduction
Authorship as a concept is designed to produce coherence and certainty. This
is the argument of Michel Foucault’s ‘What is an Author?’ which concludes
by suggesting that an author is
thomas betteridge, gregory thompson262
… a certain functional principle by which in our culture, one limits, excludes, and
chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation,
the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction. In fact, if we
are accustomed to presenting the author as a genius, as a perpetual surging of
invention, it is because, in reality, we make him function in exactly the opposite
fashion. (1986, 119)
Foucault’s description of the authorial function as a point of closure or
restriction and his coupling of it with the fantasy of individual genius
seems almost parodic in its relevance to current discussions of early modern
dramatic authorship. Indeed, there is clearly a sense in which the ‘Shakespeare
authorship’ debate is oxymoronic. To debate the status of an author, as opposed
to a writer, seems inherently problematic. If authorship implies certainty and
coherence then to introduce uncertainty and dissonance is to attack the very
basis of the concept of authorship. This is because authorship relates not to
pragmatic questions about who wrote a particular piece of text or literary
work but to much more fundamental questions concerning the relationship
between language, being and meaning. There has always been a link between
claims of authorship and legal discourses of ownership and it is no surprise
that a significant number of the few occasions where Shakespeare appears in
the historical record are related to court cases. To claim authorship, either for
oneself or for another, is to participate in the discourses of the oath. Giorgio
Agamben writes: ‘… the oath expresses the demand, decisive in every sense for
the speaking animal, to put its nature at stake in language and to bind together
in an ethical and political connection words, things and actions’ (2010, 69).
To be an author, or to embrace this role as, for example, Ben Jonson did, is
to function as a point of coherence and meaning and to embrace the rewards
and risks associated with authorship. The stakes are high for authors, writers
risk less and make much more limited claims; they are simpler people who
happen to earn a living by producing texts to be read, watched and consumed.
The violence that attends so much of the debate over Shakespeare’s
authorship, the entirely disproportionate responses by serious academics
to legitimate scholarly questions, but equally the fantasies and conspiracy
theories that no one but their proponents can take seriously, reflect a desire to
protect Shakespeare as a point of coherence, stability and fixity; as an author,
not a writer. The debate over Shakespeare’s authorship consistently veers into
hyperbole and polemic because at its heart is an endless, impossible to fulfil
desire, much like Othello’s to ‘see’ Desdemona’s virtue, to grasp or fix the truth
of who wrote Shakespeare’s plays; to ‘see’ beyond doubt Shakespeare the author.1
1 This is of course a tautological statement but it is precisely the kind of statement that
one ends up making when discussing these questions. Indeed, as we shall go on to suggest,
the Shakespeare authorship debate functions precisely to generate these kinds of statements.
authorship in performance 263
2. Part I: ‘Give me ocular proof ’
The sterility of much of the debate over the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays
is a product of precisely the tension that Foucault suggests is fundamental to
the authorial function. This is equally true of the serious academic work on
attribution and collaboration as it is to the far less important efforts of some
scholars to deny that Shakespeare wrote the plays that now bear his name. The
desire to replace one genius as a point of textual stability, ‘Shakespeare’, with
another, ‘Oxford’, ‘Bacon’, or ‘Queen Elizabeth’ is not simply pointless because
it is often based on clearly tendentious arguments, the most notorious being
that Shakespeare was not learned enough to have written the plays that bear
his name, it is far more fundamentally flawed due to the fantasies of inspired
authorship that seem to shape it. It is, however, important to note, as we have
already suggested, that even within the far more rigorous world of academic
attribution studies there also appear to be a number of under-interrogated
assumptions and unspoken desires. In particular, there is a sense in even the
most rigorous attribution studies, developing the most up-to-date computer
analysis, that what is being engaged in is a process of purgation or alchemy
whose end result, which is in practice predicated throughout, is to produce real
or unalloyed Shakespeare; to produce what the critic already knows is true.
We are not experts in the field of Shakespeare authorship and this
article offers itself as a tentative and uncertain contribution to the debate.
Our approach is informed by practice as research methodology and, from
this perspective, a degree of scepticism concerning the purpose of not only
general questions of Shakespearean authorship but more specifically the use of
statistics to determine which plays, and which parts of plays, were written by
Shakespeare. Brian Vickers has recently suggested that ‘Against the Romantic
notion of individual inspiration, free of any financial considerations, we need
to conceive of an artefact produced by a work-sharing process, in which
certain elements of the composition are delegated to other hands under the
supervision of the master craftsman’ (2007, 312).
Our experience of working in the contemporary theatre, which one could
legitimately suggest is irrelevant due to the massive historical and cultural
changes that have taken place over the last five hundred years, leads us to strongly
support Vickers’ notion that early modern plays were written through a ‘work-
sharing process’. One of the most problematic aspects of much of the current
work on Shakespearean authorship is that it is based on a quaintly donnish
understanding of how plays are and probably were produced. We do not know
to what extent the ‘writing’ of an Elizabethan play was the product of specific
writers or if the actors and producers who had to make a play work on stage
did not have an important role in its composition. We can draw up data-banks
of a writer’s lexicon, idiosyncratic uses of words and linguistic structures, but
there is no way of knowing if what appears to be the presence of a particular
thomas betteridge, gregory thompson264
authorial hand in a text simply reflects the influence of an actor who happens
to have shared our chosen writer’s linguistic habits. Tiffany Stern’s recent study,
Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (2009) demonstrates with
precision the perspicacity of Vickers’ ‘work-sharing’ suggestion in relation
to the production of early modern theatrical texts. Stern points out that, for
example, ‘prologues and epilogues were regularly written by someone other than
the playwright’ (110). Stern also details the complex relationship between plot
writers and play composers and points out that these were often different people.
Early modern theatrical texts were produced through a process that required
specialization and efficient use of resources. In this context it made sense for
the labour of producing a play to be split up so that individual aspects of the
production process were undertaken by those whose skills were best fitted for
the specific task that needed to be completed; plotting, dialogue or prologue
writer. In this context the obvious deficiencies in the existing data − we do not
have a verbatim written account of a plot discussion or a rehearsal − render any
statistical approach to early modern theatrical authorship irredeemably flawed.
This article is a contribution to the debate over Shakespearean authorship.
The first part discusses the nature of current debates over this authorship.
The second part is an attempt to introduce a different performance-based
methodology to research into Shakespeare and authorship. This is a relatively
limited article largely because we were restricted in terms of resources to
conduct only one performance-based workshop. This article is, however,
prompted by a desire to start to develop a new theatrical performance-based
language for research into the authorship of early modern plays. We would
hope in the future to be able to conduct far more extensive performance-based
workshops and experiments on a range of early modern play texts and dramas.
In 3.3 of Othello the eponymous hero makes an impossible demand of Iago:
Othello. Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore.
Be sure of it. Give me ocular proof,
Or, by the worth of man’s eternal soul,
Thou hadst been better have been born a dog
Than answer my waked wrath. (3.3.364-368)2
Iago knows that what Othello is demanding here is an impossibility. As he later
tells Othello, ‘Her [Desdemona’s] honour is an essence that’s not seen’ (4.1.16).
The truth that Othello tragically forgets is that there are some things that
cannot be seen. Or at least are beyond instrumental standards of proof. It is
impossible for Iago to satisfy Othello’s desire for ocular proof of Desdemona’s
honour. This is partly because for Othello, like a number of Shakespeare’s
2 Shakespeare quotations are from Wells and Taylor (1986).
authorship in performance 265
other male leads, King Lear and Leontes being the obvious examples, there
is a disturbing misogynistic side to the desire to see Desdemona’s honour –
as if only a pornographic image of Desdemona’s body fully open to the male
gaze would satisfy him. But the truth is that even this would not be enough
for Othello. His desire for ocular proof of Desdemona’s honour reflects his
fears, his inability to escape the real world where no one can fully know
anything. Or rather, and more accurately, it is Othello’s refusal of the logic of
Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ speech that existence requires an acceptance of
the provisional and performative. As Stanley Cavell points out with reference
to Hamlet’s words, ‘To exist is to take your existence upon you, to enact it,
as if the basis of human existence is theatre, even melodrama. To refuse this
burden is to condemn yourself to scepticism – to a denial of the existence,
hence of the value, of the world’ (2003, 187).
Othello cannot tolerate the theatrical, enacted nature of human existence.
He carves fixity and order to protect him from the terror of having to enact
his own existence. Desdemona for Othello has to be fully fixed in the role
of honourable, truthful wife, a wife free of the taint of performance of the
requirement to enact. Any cracks in this artifice, which he has created,
any doubt and Othello’s whole world starts to spin out of control; perhaps
Desdemona is not who he thought she was at all. And therefore Othello is
not who he thought he was either.
Iago’s seduction of Othello is so subtle but at the same time effective
because it exploits Othello’s existing weakness or unspoken desire for a sense of
certainty beyond speech or language. Iago simply has to introduce uncertainty
into Othello’s world to produce a violent disproportionate reaction.
Iago. Ha, I like not that.
Othello. What does thou say?
Iago. Nothing, my lord, or if, I know not what.
Othello. Was not that Cassio parted from my wife?
Iago. Cassio, my lord? No, sure, I cannot think it,
That he would steal away so guilty-like,
Seeing your coming. (3.3.33-39)
Later Iago simply repeats Othello’s words to further encourage his fears and
provoke his suspicions. Othello kills Desdemona to stop what he believes
erroneously is, to use again Foucault’s words, her ‘free circulation, free
manipulation, free composition and recomposition’. Othello kills the thing he
loves in order to make her more properly worthy of being the object of his love.
Brian Vickers has recently suggested that the aim of authorship studies,
and in particular the careful discussion of attribution and collaboration is to
get a better understanding of the real Shakespeare. Vickers writes: ‘identifying
his co-authors does not diminish Shakespeare’s achievement: on the contrary, it
thomas betteridge, gregory thompson266
helps us to define that achievement more clearly, and to distinguish it from his
collaborators’. Vickers goes on to paraphrase Matthew Arnold and to conclude
his piece by suggesting: ‘our task is to see him steadily and see him whole’ (2007,
352). This, however, seems a problematic suggestion. In his article ‘Incomplete
Shakespeare: Or, Denying Coauthorship in 1 Henry VI ’ (2007), Vickers
builds on the arguments he first articulated in Shakespeare, Co-Author (2002)
to argue that a number of Shakespeare’s plays were co-authored. The evidence
that Vickers provides, which is entirely persuasive, is based on incongruences
and inconsistencies, linguistic and stylistic, that exist between passages in a
number of the plays that have been traditionally attributed to Shakespeare. In
effect, what Vickers proposes, and indeed what he enacts, in his 2007 article
and, to a far greater degree, in Shakespeare, Co-Author, is a breaking down of
‘Shakespeare’ or at least the Shakespearean text into small abstract entities that
at one level seem profoundly un- or even anti-Shakespearean. Slavoj Žižek
comments, in relation to courtly love: ‘external hindrances that thwart our
access to the object are there precisely to create the illusion that without them,
the object would be directly accessible − what such hindrances thereby conceal
is the inherent impossibility of attaining the object’ (1994, 94).
As Othello gets more and more desperate for proof of Desdemona’s
infidelity, Iago simply produces more and more uncertainty. Ultimately what
Othello wants to see, to know, is beyond Iago’s gift. The complex graphs
and tables that fill the works of scholars in the Shakespeare authorship
debate conceal the inherent impossibility of what they are seeking to attain.
As Vickers breaks Shakespeare down into smaller and smaller linguistic
units, he seems further and further away from seeing him ‘steadily and
whole’; Shakespeare the author seems more and more inaccessible. Indeed
it is perhaps only stretching the point slightly to see the patterns formed by
Vickers’ graphs and tables in his work as akin to the mystical markings that
cover the handkerchief that Othello gave Desdemona and which he elevates
to the status of thing which can prove, and embody, Desdemona’s virtue.
Neither will ultimately give Vickers or Othello what they want. In fact both
graphs and stains are in practice hindrances that conceal the impossibility
of what they desire. It is difficult to imagine any real certainty in relation to
Shakespeare’s authorship which is not ultimately based on an act of aesthetic
judgment. But aesthetic judgment is now wizened and has to keep out of
sight. There is something rather dispiriting and even alienating in reading
articles on Shakespeare full of statistics and graphs since they seem a world
apart from the nature of his drama and its art.
3. Part II: ‘I am not what I am’
We want to pause here and reflect back on what we have so far written. There
authorship in performance 267
is something not quite right. What we have written fails. And it fails, we
would argue, because it adopts a purely textual approach to the discussion of
an issue that could be better investigated through performance. The following
is a brief sketch of a method for investigating questions of Shakespearean
authorship and attribution based on theatrical practice. Play texts are read
but they are also performed and heard.
For the actor, theatre texts, for the most part, begin with the eyes. The
actor prepares for audition with a text in a printed book, or occasionally even
now, an extract on a sheet of paper but, more likely, a text seen on a smart
phone or tablet. Extra-textual signifiers: the punctuation; the capital letters;
the line ending; perhaps an editor’s notes; even the name of the author; all
serve to help the reader find meaning and a journey through the text. The
first few days of rehearsal are most often spent around a table with a book,
smart phone or tablet in hand. Even today with the advent of electronic script
and instant theatre techniques most rehearsals still require the actor to be
connected to a printed text before giving flight in later stages of rehearsal.
Audiences for the most part do not bring copies of the text to performances.
They receive the text not through their eyes but through their ears. Of course
some performances are of well-loved plays that have been seen before and the
advent of foreign language productions and surtitles provide exceptions, but for
the most part audiences hear a text as it is spoken, a text that they may never have
seen on the page. It is often remarked that it takes an audience a few minutes
to tune into a performance of an early modern text and as those texts are most
often, nearly always, Shakespeare we say it takes a few minutes to tune into
Shakespeare, the unmistakable sound of the Bard. The question we sought to
test through the rehearsal process was whether the genius of Shakespeare can
be discerned by the ear. In even the early works, those written before 1599, can
the distinctive Shakespearean voice be known most certain?
To establish a methodology we went back to an exercise that Gregory
Thompson first encountered in a workshop for young directors at the National
Theatre Studio given by Peter Gill in 1998. Peter Gill is a Welsh theatre
director, playwright and actor. He directed his first production at the Royal
Court Theatre in 1965, was Artistic Director of the Riverside Studios and
was an Associate Director of the National Theatre from 1980 to 1997. Gill
founded the National Theatre Studio in 1984. His work has a precise beauty
and depth born out of a deep examination of the text and the world of the
play. Gill is fastidious in his attitude to text: there may be many ways to play
a text, a speech, or a word but it only means one thing.
At that rehearsal in 1998 Gill gave out sheets of A4 and instructed the
company to keep them face down. Then one person was asked to turn over and
read and the rest were asked to listen and if they heard a better way to say the
lines to stop the speaker by saying: ‘No’. The person who stopped the speaker
was then invited to turn over their paper and read the text as they understood
thomas betteridge, gregory thompson268
it. On the paper was a string of words typed out all in capitals.
UP FROM MY CABIN MY SEA-GOWN SCARFED ABOUT ME IN THE
DARK GROPED I TO FIND OUT THEM HAD MY DESIRE FINGERED
THEIR PACKET AND IN FINE WITHDREW TO MINE OWN ROOM
AGAIN MAKING SO BOLD MY FEARS FORGETTING MANNERS TO
UNSEAL THEIR GR AND COMMISSION WHERE I FOUND HOR ATIO O
ROYAL KNAVERY AN EXACT COMMAND LARDED WITH MANY SORTS
OF REASONS IMPORTING DENMARK’S HEALTH AND ENGLAND’S
TOO WITH HO SUCH BUGS AND GOBLINS IN MY LIFE THAT ON THE
SUPERVISE NO LEISURE BATED NO NOT TO STAY THE GRINDING OF
THE AXE MY HEAD SHOULD BE STRUCK OFF
It took several attempts before the text began to f low and a certain
competitiveness developed among the actors and directors in the circle. What
this process produced was an engagement with the text that was collective
and performative. The group worked together to build up a version of the
speech that made sense without relying on extra-textual clues and signposts.
Of course, some of the actors and directors, like many of the academics who
are reading this, perhaps even yourself now, recognize the words Hamlet uses
to tell Horatio what he did when bound for England (5.2.12-25). Shakespeare
is accorded special status in the theatre. Even in productions that shine less
bright there is a faith that the audience will hear ‘his powerful sound within
an organ weak’. We decided to test this assumption and question what it is
that the audience hears.
We adapted the Gill technique to explore a methodology for an
investigation into the sound of Shakespeare in comparison to other early
modern writers. Our method was tested at Brunel University London, in
February 2015 with eight theatre students.3 We sat in a circle with eight
texts: four from a Shakespeare play, King John, and four from an anonymous
Elizabethan play, Look About You. Both plays feature characters from the
same period of English history. To select a text at random, to start with the
participants were asked to choose a number from 1 to 8. The papers with
the chosen text were handed around, one for each participant and kept face
down, like an exam. The paper contained only one speech.
There was a preamble to our exercise: ‘This is an exercise about what you
hear. It’s not about the quality of your reading or the reading of anyone else in
the group. Similarly it’s not about the quality of your acting: this is more like
a rehearsal exercise for discovery than performance practice. The exercise is
about your listening and understanding and the listening and understanding
3 The students involved were Julia Canavan, Zoe Wood, Seb James, Jenny Campbell-
Williams, Normae Nundall, Freya Wilson, Sam Parker and Matt Patterson.
authorship in performance 269
of the group: we will build it up together. It would be remarkable if one person
were able to sail through without hearing the contributions of others. In a
moment one person will turn over the paper and without hesitation begin to
read aloud. They will resist the urge to scan the text and just begin reading
aloud from the top. They will continue to read until someone says, ‘Thank
you’. And then the speaker will turn the paper over immediately. Please resist
the temptation to rescan the text with your eyes. This is an exercise for the
ears. You have to turn the paper over straight away because the eyes are very
quick. I would like you to say, ‘Thank you’ as soon as you no longer follow the
text or understand what is being said or if you can hear a better way through
the text or even if you become aware that your mind has wandered. Just say,
‘Thank you’. This is not an exercise in politeness but in your listening so,
please, rather than allowing them to keep going, respond to incomprehension
by stopping the speaker with thanks’.
Spring 2015. A rehearsal studio on the edge of London. Eight students,
two professors, a theatre director, and eight early modern speeches. The
texts are face down. One participant turns the paper over and begins to read
straight away. The exercise, however, is not about the speaker but about what
is heard. Does it make sense? Can you hear a different way through? If the
text makes no sense to a listener they say ‘Thank you’ and the speaker stops
and turns the paper back over. It is important that the eyes are not engaged
except in the act of reading. Each repetition begins from the top of the paper.
Sometimes the text is stopped after a few words. Sometimes it runs along.
Often hesitant. Sometimes sure. As the ears of the participants tune into early
modern English and familiarity builds, a pattern emerges, a story through
the passage discovered and the text becomes clear.
Some word strings are easier than others, found in the first, second or
third repetition. Some become a point of contention when there seems to be
two opposing ways to meaning. The quality of listening in the room changes
as the exercise progresses. We are all engaged in the same process of discovery.
Sometimes it helps, as meaning emerges, to read with an attitude, to act as
it were. For the most part the words are delivered simply and clearly with a
desire to uncover the meaning of the text.
Of course it is hard to fully communicate our processes in writing as the
exercise is experiential. It aims to bypass the usual way we understand texts
by reading them and talking about them and to put us as scholars into the
position of the audience: receiving the text through our ears. The exercise
repeats the experience of the audience: hearing the text with attention rapt.
No time is spent breaking the text down or talking about the text.
Here are the eight texts we used in the first experiment to establish a
methodology. Try reading them aloud. Resist the temptation to work it out
and simply listen to the stream of words. If it makes no sense, stop and cover
thomas betteridge, gregory thompson270
the text. Then begin again from the top. Allow your listening to find the
story of the text.
1. is it not wrong think you when all the world troubled with rumour of a captive
queen imprisoned by her husband in a realm where her own son doth wear a diadem
is like an head of people mutinous still murmuring at the shame done her and us
is it not more wrong when her mother zeal sounded through Europe Afric Asia
tells in the hollow of news-thirsting ears queen Elinor lives in a dungeon for pity
and affection to her son but when the true cause Clifford’s daughter’s death shall
be exposed to stranger nations what volumes will be writ what libels spread and in
each line our state dishonoured
2. his highness doth tells you it is a shame for such wild youth to smother any impiety
with shew to chastise loose adultery say Rosamond was Henry’s Concubine had
never King a Concubine but he did Rosamond begin the fires in France made she the
northern borders reek with flames unpeopled she the towns of Picardy left she the wives
of England husbandless oh no she sinn’d I grant so do we all she fell herself, desiring
none should fall but Elinor whom you so much commend hath been the bellows of
seditious fire either through jealous rage or mad desire is’t not a shame to think that
she hath arm’d four sons right hands against their father’s head and not the children
of a low-priz’d wretch but one whom God on earth hath deified see where he sits with
sorrow in his eyes three of his sons and hers tutor’d by her smiles whilst he weeps and
with a proud disdain embrace blithe mirth while his sad heart complain
3. will this content you I that have sat still amaz’d to see my sons devoid of shame to
hear my subjects with rebellious tongues wound the kind bosom of their sovereign
can no more bear but from a bleeding heart deliver all my love for all your hate will
this content thee cruel Elinor your savage mother my uncivil queen the tigress that
hath drunk the purple blood of three times twenty thousand valiant men washing
her red chaps in the weeping tears of widows virgins nurses sucking babes and lastly
sorted with her damn’d consorts enter’d a labyrinth to murther love will this content
you she shall be releas’d that she may next seize me she most envies
4. be pleased king puppet have I stood for thee even in the mouth of death open’d
my arms to circle in sedition’s ugly shape shook hands with duty bad adieu to virtue
profan’d all majesty in heaven and earth writ in black characters on my white brow
the name of rebel John against his father for thee for thee thou o’tomy of honour
thou worm of Majesty thou froth thou bubble and must I now be pleas’d in peace
to stand while statutes make thee owner of my land
5. Philip of France in right and true behalf of thy deceased brother Geoffrey’s son
Arthur Plantagenet lays most lawful claim to this fair island and the territories to
Ireland Poitiou Anjou Touraine Maine desiring thee to lay aside the sword which
sways usurpingly these several titles and put the same into young Arthur’s hand thy
nephew and right royal sovereign
6. what now my son have I not ever said how that ambitious Constance would not
authorship in performance 271
cease till she had kindled France and all the world upon the right and party of her
son this might have been prevented and made whole with very easy arguments of love
which now the manage of two kingdoms must with fearful-bloody issue arbitrate
7. sirrah your brother is legitimate your father’s wife did after wedlock bear him and if she
did play false the fault was hers which fault lies on the hazards of all husbands that marry
wives tell me how if my brother who as you say took pains to get this son had of your
father claimed this son for his in sooth good friend your father might have kept this calf
bred from his cow from all the world in sooth he might then if he were my brother’s my
brother might not claim him nor your father being none of his refuse him this concludes
my mother’s son did get your father’s heir your father’s heir must have your father’s land
8. madam an if my brother had my shape and I had his sir Robert’s his like him and
if my legs were two such riding-rods my arms such eel-skins stuffed my face so thin
that in mine ear I durst not stick a rose lest men should say look where three-farthings
goes and to his shape were heir to all this land would I might never stir from off this
place I would give it every foot to have this face it would not be Sir Nob in any case
Many readers of this article will recognize these texts but for those who did not
– could you tell which is Shakespeare? And which is not? Which texts carry
the unmistakable sound of the bard? Which of these texts are most certain
Shakespeare? We urge you to go back and read aloud the unpunctuated texts
until you hear the story in each of them. Would it help to have the punctuation?
1. is it not wrong, think you, when all the world troubled with rumour of a captive
queen, imprisoned by her husband in a realm, where her own son doth wear a diadem?
Is like an head of people mutinous, still murmuring at the shame done her and us?
Is’t not more wrong, when her mother zeal, sounded through Europe, Afric, Asia,
tells in the hollow of news-thirsting ears, Queen Elinor lives in a dungeon, for pity
and affection to her son? But when the true cause, Clifford’s daughter’s death, shall
be exposed to stranger nations, what volumes will be writ, what libels spread, and in
each line our state dishonoured!
Would it help to have the line-endings?
1. is it not wrong think you when all the world
troubled with rumour of a captive queen
imprisoned by her husband in a realm
where her own son doth wear a diadem
is like an head of people mutinous
still murmuring at the shame done her and us
is’t not more wrong when her mother zeal
sounded through Europe Afric Asia
tells in the hollow of news-thirsting ears
queen Elinor lives in a dungeon
for pity and affection to her son
thomas betteridge, gregory thompson272
but when the true cause, Clifford’s daughter’s death
shall be exposed to stranger nations
what volumes will be writ what libels spread
and in each line our state dishonoured
Or both – line endings and punctuation.
1. Is it not wrong, think you, when all the world
Troubled with rumour of a captive queen,
Imprisoned by her husband in a realm,
Where her own son doth wear a diadem?
Is like an head of people mutinous,
Still murmuring at the shame done her and us?
Is it not more wrong, when her mother zeal,
Sounded through Europe, Afric, Asia,
Tells in the hollow of news-thirsting ears,
Queen Elinor lives in a dungeon,
For pity and affection to her son?
But when the true cause Clifford’s daughter’s death,
Shall be exposed to stranger nations,
What volumes will be writ, what libels spread,
And in each line our state dishonoured!
Would it be a clue to authorship to know the names of the characters?
1. LEICESTER.
2. LANCASTER.
3. OLD KING.
4. JOHN.
5. CHATILLION.
6. ELEANOR.
7. KING JOHN.
8. BASTARD
Once we had read all the passages through we asked the participants to judge
whether a passage was Shakespeare or not and why. Please go back to the
unpunctuated texts above and rate them: Shakespeare, Not Shakespeare.
You may have recognized the last four texts: they’re all from King John
(1.1). However the first four texts are all from Look About You (1.2), an
anonymous play printed in 1600 and possibly written sometime earlier in the
1590s when there was something of a vogue for disguise plays. More often
than not our participants – both students and professors – judged passages
from Look About You to be Shakespeare while rejecting those from King
John as Not Shakespeare. The reasons given included the sound, the rhythm,
the vocabulary, the imagery, the names of the characters. Interestingly, one
participant said if it sounded good it was Shakespeare, if not it wasn’t.
authorship in performance 273
So perhaps all we showed by trying to adapt rehearsal techniques to
investigate Shakespeare’s authorship reveals nothing more than the ideas we hold
about what Shakespeare is. There is an argument that as Shakespeare is, for most
people, the only early modern playwright, so that he has come to own everything
in the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre: that which is common to the time and
that which is his. It might be said that our workshop produced nothing more
than the tentative and uncertain conclusions of existing attribution methods. Our
limited workshop was less useful in academic terms than the statistical analysis
undertaken by such scholars as Brian Vickers or Jonathan Hope. We would
argue, however, that we demonstrated that there is scope for applying practice
as research techniques to the study of early modern drama: that it reveals both
how a text is heard and some of the assumptions we have about Shakespeare.
And that using performance within the context of discussions of Shakespearean
authorship is useful, if only in order to complicate assumptions about the
primacy of the written word. We would also suggest that turning to performance
research methodologies will, at the least, turn Shakespeare authorship studies
back towards the plays themselves and how they sound on stage.
4. Conclusion
We think the de-capitalized, unpunctuated, line-ending stripped exercise has
the potential to investigate authorship and our ideas around it by revealing what
an audience hears and what that says about our assumptions of Shakespeare
and early modern texts. We would like to run a series of workshops with
theatre professionals, academics, theatregoers and drama students to establish
a methodology for analysing the responses to the exercise. Whether it reveals
an authorship test of any validity or a series of assumptions about Shakespeare
is to be discovered.
Traditional Shakespeare authorship studies are predicated on a denied or
hidden ‘temporal loop’. Like all narratives, they silently presuppose as already
given what they purport to produce.4 Iago’s ‘evidence’ of Desdemona’s guilt
produces simply what Othello already thinks he knows. Shakespeare as an
author exists as the object, a centre of coherence, consistency and value, which
authorship studies simultaneously critique and presuppose. Vickers, in a recent
review article, discusses with his usual lucidity two recent works that address the
attribution of a number of early modern plays. Reflecting upon the similarities
between two passages, from The Spanish Tragedy and 2 Henry VI, Vickers
comments that ‘The closeness of the parallel, in both words and thought, and the
4 This is a paraphrase of Žižek’s comment that ‘The price one pays for narrative resolution
is the petitio principii of the temporal loop – the narrative silently presupposes as already given
what it purports to reproduce …’ (1997, 11).
thomas betteridge, gregory thompson274
similarity in the dramatic context – a man in authority rebuking a wrongdoer –
rules out any other explanation, such as plagiarism or imitation: both passages
come from Shakespeare’s verbal memory (2011, 109).
Vickers’ argument is entirely sound but it does presuppose a person called
Shakespeare whose verbal memory can be accessed through textual comparison.
John Burrows has recently responded to Vickers’ critique of his work, and that
of other scholars, by suggesting that Vickers’ critique amounts ‘to an exercise
in self-exposure’ (2012, 355). This is undoubtedly the case, but we are not sure
that this is an entirely legitimate complaint. Vickers has consistently argued
that ultimately questions of authorship come down to academic and scholarly
judgment. Unlike Othello, Vickers knows, as is reflected in, for example, his
reference to Shakespeare’s verbal memory, that authorship cannot be proved by
statistics and graphs – in the final analysis it is necessary to awaken one’s faith.5
Works Cited
Agamben Giorgio (2010 [2008]), The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath,
trans. by A. Kotsko, Stanford, Stanford University Press.
Anonymous (1600 [1913]), Look About You, ed by W.W. Greg, Malone Society Reprints,
Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Burrows John (2012), ‘A Second Opinion on “Shakespeare and Authorship Studies in the
Twenty-First Century” ’, Shakespeare Quarterly 63, 3, 355-392.
Cavell Stanley (2003), Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press.
Foucault Michel (1986 [1969]), ‘What is an Author?’, trans. by J.V. Harari, in P. Rabinow,
ed., The Foucault Reader, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 101-120.
Leahy William (2010), ‘Shakinomics; Or, the Shakespeare Authorship Question and the
Undermining of Traditional Authority’, in W. Leahy, ed., Shakespeare and His Authors:
Critical Perspectives on the Authorship Question, London, Continuum, 114-124.
Stern Tiffany (2009), Documents of Performance in Early Modern England, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press.
Vickers Brian (2002), Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays,
Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Vickers Brian (2007), ‘Incomplete Shakespeare: Or, Denying Coauthorship in 1 Henry
VI’, Shakespeare Quarterly 58, 3, 311-352.
Vickers Brian (2011), ‘Shakespeare and Authorship Studies in the Twenty-First Century’,
Shakespeare Quarterly 62, 1, 106-142.
Wells Stanley and Gary Taylor, eds (1986), William Shakespeare: The Complete Works,
Oxford, Clarendon Press.
Žižek Slavoj (1994), The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality,
London, Verso.
Žižek Slavoj (1997), The Plague of Fantasies, London, Verso.
5 As William Leahy points out, the evidence that exists for Shakespeare (and some of the other
alternatives) as the author is enough to build a belief upon but it is not enough to build knowledge
upon. As far as Shakespeare is concerned, there is simply too much uncertainty (2010, 119).