When and How Were the 1623 Folio Plays Written and Edited?
Gary Taylor and John Jowett. Shakespeare Reshaped, 1606-1623. 352pp, hardback. $155. ISBN: 978-0-198122562. Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online: Oxford University Press, 1993.
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According to my findings, the plays included in the 1623 Folio collection of “Shakespeare” plays were written primarily by Fletcher and Munday. Many of them had not been published ever before, and if they had been performed, they were heavily edited if not nearly entirely re-written between their performance and this publication. The 1623 Folio has been utilized as the main source for deciding if a given play is attributed to “Shakespeare” or if it is labeled as Apocrypha, or a text that might have even had “Shakespeare” in its “written by…” line on the title page, but because it was not included in the 1623 folio scholars have insisted it could not actually be by Shakespeare. This seemingly random mis-attribution was crafted by publishers who established “Shakespeare” as a top British author, including the Pope collection of “Shakespeare” plays; Pope explained his selection was based on the superiority of the works in the 1623 collection rather than on any attempt to exclude any plays because he believed them to be less likely to be by Shakespeare; but the following generations of publishers found that readers were more likely to purchase “complete” collections of “Shakespeare” rather than one that only included his best efforts, and so the tradition of excluding plays from the 1663-4 Folio and other plays not published in the 1623 Folio began.
Given this background, I can now introduce this book’s abstract: “This book explores the ways in which Shakespeare’s texts were reshaped in his lifetime and up till the publication of the First Folio, and the kinds of outside interference to which they were subjected.” This should be highly revealing when I have a moment to read this text more closely; it should explain how the ghostwriters behind these plays mutated them. For my project, I need to know if Fletcher and Munday wrote most of these plays specifically for the 1623 folio, or if they really just collected old plays knowing they were coming to the end of their lives. “As well as the powers of censorship of the Master of the Revels, in this period these included moves to expurgate profanity; major changes in theatrical conventions, notably the imposition of act divisions; and the late introduction of material by other hands.” This will be very useful, but these problems have been softened by past scholars. The Master of the Revels was likely to have contracted with one of these ghostwriters for his critical work, so the relationship between these writers and censoring or propagandistic efforts of the government were almost always congruent rather than conflicting, unless strive was deliberately introduced for the purpose of pressuring these writers to great degrees of obedience to the scheme. The note regarding profanity might prove doubtful as the theaters were located in the brothel districts and the plays presented tend to be heavy in their death-toll and sexual content, so it would be strange if amidst the strong language that remains, a significant portion was expunged… This type of censorship for profanity is more of a modern problem, in my opinion. If I test all of the scenes of these plays for authorial signatures separately, I might figure out which hands added which portions; however, when I have attempted testing scenes or acts that past attribution scholars have attributed to “other hands”, I discovered that they had a very similar or a shared authorial signature with the rest of the play. Given my hypotheses, I am interested to read more about this to see how Taylor and Jowett arrived at these conclusions.
It continues: “Political censorship of individual plays has already been studied in some depth: this book concentrates on the forms of interference—expurgation, Act division, interpolation—which can usefully be examined across the whole canon, and which resulted in ‘late reshaping’. These influences were at work between May 1606 and November 1623, and—unlike the political censorship, which would have come into effect immediately the plays were submitted for a licence—affected the texts years after they were first written. There is a major central study of Measure for Measure, which underwent posthumous interpolation: the book makes a strong claim for this being at the hands of Thomas Middleton.” Well, it was definitely not by Middleton as my linguistics demonstrate Middleton hired ghostwriters, and Measure registered as matching Fletcher’s authorial signature.