Shakespearean Monuments

Since Shakespeare's death eulogists and panegyrists have often compared his dramatic legacy to a monument. The analogy's origins go back to the prefatory verses composed for the first folio (1623) by Ben Jonson and Leonard Digges, and for the second folio (1632) by John Milton. The conceit lent itself to early modern poets because, in the English of their day, the word “monument” could signify a written memorial as well as a funerary statue or construction. Horace's conceit, “Exegi monumentum aere perennius | regalique situ pyramidium altius,” “I have finished a monument more lasting than bronze, more lofty than the regal structure of the pyramids” (Odes III.xxx.1–2), especially befitted an author whose only other memorial was the bust that Gheerart Janseen sculpted for his provincial grave. The relative modesty of that tomb lent weight to the suggestion of Digges's poem that it was the compendium of his literary remains that would prove the more enduring tribute:

Shakespeare had himself employed the device in sonnet 81's suggestion that its own language would conserve its addressee: “Your monument shall be my gentle verse” (Shakespeare's Sonnets 273).

In fact, the monumental analogy, with its suggestions of imperviousness, stability, and timelessness, is arguably an unsuitable evocation of the documents upon which Heminge and Condell based the Folio. David Scott Kastan believes that as many as thirty-three of that volume's thirty-six texts were probably based on “scribal transcripts or the bookkeepers’ marked playbooks” and had therefore been subject to processes of alteration, regularization, and excision before they reached the printers (73). Nevertheless, the weighty Folio – in its monolithic format, with Martin Droeshout's engraving of the writer, and prefaced by its literary tributes – presented itself as Shakespeare's literary mausoleum. The usage of the very word “Shakespeare,” a term which can still refer to the collected plays as well as to their author, endorses this conception of the works as their author's preservation.Footnote ¹

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In the eulogies of Jonson, Digges, and Milton, Shakespeare was enshrined in his book.Footnote ² Over time, however, the analogy came to be appropriated by those for whom Shakespeare survived in other ways, venues, and forms. Michael Dobson's study of the development of the writer's reputation in the century after the Restoration, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769, suggests a number of factors that led to the revision of the idea that the folio itself was the cornerstone or centrepiece of Shakespeare's legacy. By the mid-eighteenth century, editors had heavily emended its texts, playwrights had freely adapted the canon, and commemorative events – such as the unveiling of Peter Scheemaker's Westminster abbey statue in 1741 and the 1769 Jubilee festivities – were imbuing the figure of Shakespeare with new cultural and political significances. Around those years various memorialists identified Shakespeare's legacy not only with the text but also with the contemporary stage, the actors who reincarnated him, and his status as a personification of British culture.Footnote ³

The Shakespearean corpus, considered as a collection of documentary artefacts, did not feature prominently in the ceremonies or the poems of the 1769 Jubilee celebrations. Whereas Digges presented the book as the bier from which the reader would resurrect the author, “ev'ry line, each verse / Here shall revive, redeem thee from thy hearse” (9–10), Garrick's Jubilee Ode affected not to resurrect its subject but to beatify him. In this poem Shakespeare's afterlife was not primarily bound up with the fate of his book but became something more spiritual, ethereal, and diffuse. Shakespeare was a “genius of the isle,” a “blest SPIRIT,” and, in the ode's final chorus, an apotheosized “Name”:

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Each of these conceptions of Shakespeare's afterlife continued into the nineteenth century and influenced the 1864 tercentenary commemorations. Thomas Carlyle's lecture on the “Hero as Poet” (1840) imagined Shakespeare's dominions extending around the globe in his capacity as the ethnic, historical, and cultural unifier of the Anglophone world: “we can fancy him radiant aloft over all the Nations of Englishmen” (97). The view of Shakespeare as a British hero prompted some to suggest that another iconic memorial should be dedicated to him either in London or in Stratford, a town that antiquarian research and literary pilgrimages were already turning into a sort of open-air museum.Footnote ⁴ For others, Shakespeare was, above all else, a man of the theatre. The Reverend J. M. Jephson, for instance, called for the establishment of “a theatre in which the Shakespearian drama could be acted” (202). Editors and publishers, meanwhile, revived the idea that it was the text that, above all, secured Shakespeare's literary immortality. The idea of a definitively monumental edition, founded upon the original folio, re-emerged as both an adjunct and an alternative to the other forms of Tercentenary celebrations.

From the 1840s to the 1860s, as scholars debated how the textual legacy might be restored to its supposed original integrity, there were a number of major developments in Shakespeare scholarship: there was the growth of a conservative editorial school advocating the restoration of readings from the early quartos and the first folio; there were the publications of the Shakespeare Society (1840–53); there were the fascinating annotations that one of the Society's most prominent members, John Payne Collier, claimed to discover in a copy of the second folio and the investigations that eventually exposed the marginalia as bogus (1859); there were two editions that imitated or reproduced the first folio; and there was the so-called “Cambridge Shakespeare” (1863–66) whose apparatus documented and attributed every significant variant known at that date.

The strong re-emergence of the monumental metaphor among Victorian scholars supports Kristian Smidt's claim that the “creed” of post-Romantic Shakespeare reverence amounted to the triple belief that “the revealed text” is “ideal,” “perfect,” and “timeless” (12). However, this description needs to be counterbalanced by recognition of Victorian sensitivity to the texts’ materiality, imperfection, and deterioration. In his article on the Victorian interaction between the study of the Bard and of the Bible, Charles Laporte identifies the highly ambivalent status of the Shakespearean text in the nineteenth-century. Laporte shows how the belief that the plays had “a similarly sacred character to that of the Scriptures” helped to make them objects of both devotion and disbelief, as the high-critical inquiry into the origins of the gospels inspired anti-Stratfordians to reattribute the Shakespearean canon (619). The combination of reverence and scepticism, identified by Laporte in relation to the authorship question, also characterises mid-Victorian discussions of textual integrity. Readers frequently equated Shakespeare's text and the King James Bible in terms of their literary quality, their cultural importance, and, for some, their moral authority. Archbishop Trench's Tercentenary sermon found that the deeply complex language of the plays, even those with pagan settings, “often reminds us of scripture” (Hunter 205). Similarly, for Cardinal Wiseman phrases extracted from the plays could be read like the Book of Proverbs: “the author’[s] . . . sententious sayings . . . seem almost sacred” (20). For those who regarded the Shakespearean text as sacrosanct, the inaccurate transmission of it was a sort of heresy akin to the mistranslation of the Bible. Readers expressed their belief in the sanctity of the texts through the monumental analogy; by the same token, many of them described emendation as a form of desecration. Scholarly conservationists attacked emendators as maggots eating away at the corpus, as vandals destroying an artistic legacy, and as desecrators of the textual monument.Footnote ⁵

Monumental Editions and Textual Corruption in the Mid-nineteenth Century

In 1853 a writer in Fraser's Magazine suggested that three luminaries of the Shakespeare Society – Collier, Knight, and Dyce – should celebrate Shakespeare's three hundredth birthday by collaborating on a deluxe quarto edition. The anonymous reviewer imagined how, “for the glorification of our great poet,” expert editors, illustrators, and printers might work together on this hypothetical and fittingly spectacular publication:

The essay has a special significance if The Wellesley Index is correct in attributing its authorship to the biblical and classical scholar, William George Clark. The Shakespeare Society broke up in 1853, and by 1864 it was inconceivable that Knight or Dyce would team up with Collier. It was Clark himself who, first with John Glover and then with William Aldis Wright, co-edited the outstanding scholarly achievement of the tercentenary period, the “Cambridge Shakespeare.”

On the tercentenary's eve the Bookseller, an organ of the publishing industry, playfully imagined an edifice fabricated both from the myriad versions of the text and from the extensive critical works that had responded to them:

The public interest generated by the successive Shakespeare commemorations, especially the tercentenary, helped to create new readerships and markets for editions both scholarly and popular. Reviewers pondered which of the available and projected texts made, or would make, the “best monument” to Shakespeare.

By the early nineteenth century the first folio, so liberally emended during the early-to-mid eighteenth century, had recovered its textual authority thanks largely to the decision of two editors, Edward Capell (1768) and, more influentially, Edmund Malone (1790), to adopt it and the early quartos as their copy-texts. As Andrew Murphy explains, “call[s] for a radical return to the text of the First Folio” inspired Francis Douce to reprint it, for the first time, in 1807 (Shakespeare in Print 191). Two publishers marked the 1864 anniversary by issuing versions of the original collected works, including its quirks of layout, its typographical errors, and its authentic spellings. Between 1862 and 1864 Lionel Booth issued a typeset imitation of the folio, and from 1864 to 1866 Howard Staunton oversaw a photolithographic reproduction of the document itself.

In reissuing the folio, these editors revived the spirit of Jonson's “To the memory of my beloved, the author Mr. William Shakespeare: and what he hath left us.”

This passage responds to an earlier poem on Shakespeare's death, traditionally attributed to William Basse,Footnote ⁶ that envisaged the poet joining his literary predecessors in Westminster Abbey: “Renownèd Spenser, lie a thought more nigh / To learnèd Chaucer; and rare Beaumont, lie / A little nearer Spenser, to make room / For Shakespeare in your threefold, fourfold tomb” (1–4). Jonson's phrasing, “My Shakespeare, rise,” rewrites the opening of Basse's poem, “Renownèd Spenser, lie,” to reconfigure elegy into panegyric. For Jonson “my Shakespeare” resides neither between the tomes nor among the tombs of his predecessors and peers; he is “alive” in a book that “live[s]” on in the hands and the minds of its readers.

In the mid 1840s two prominent Victorian editors were reviving the authority of the 1623 text itself. Charles Knight and Collier both advertised their editions of 1844 as restoring first folio readings and, in Collier's case, those of the early quartos. Throughout his editorial life Knight championed the folio. Each title page of his twelve-volume “Library Edition” (1842–44) carried a quotation, originally referring to Plutarch, lamenting the damage done by those who “emend[ed] . . . this author; who ought with all reverence to have been handled . . . and with all fear to have been preserved from altering, depraving, or corrupting.” The prefatory material, which reprinted the elegies of Jonson, Digges, and Milton, portrayed Heminge and Condell as preservers of the textual legacy: “if the edition of 1623 had no other claims upon the gratitude of every Englishman, it had secured from that destruction, entire or partial, which would probably have been their fate if they had remained in manuscript, some of the noblest monuments of Shakspere's genius” (1: viii).Footnote ⁷ Knight acknowledged that typographical errors needed cautious correction, but he warned that more radical alterations were unwise: editors should neither excise material they attributed to performers, nor add lines where they intuited an inadvertent ellipsis. In particular, Knight hoped the “Library” volumes would dislodge George Steevens's 1793 edition from its status as the received text. He warned his readers that it was upon that version, with its regularised versification and anachronistic rewriting, that “all the modern texts, with the exception of Boswell's [of 1821], are founded” (xxii). In contrast, Alexander Dyce, an editor more inclined to revision, regarded Knight's respect for the folio as “blind reverence” (6). In the face of such criticism, Knight was reviving the idea that the first folio was Shakespeare's literary memorial and the centrepiece of his legacy.

That conception of the folio as monument gave rise to a further idea: the belief that unwarranted emendation was an act of desecration. Knight's epigraphs to the “Library” edition's volumes equated “altering” Shakespeare's text with “corrupting” it, an accusation that informed G. H. Lewes's subsequent review. In “Shakspeare and his Editors” (1845) Lewes generally endorsed Knight's unease about anachronistic revision of Shakespeare's diction and versification. He was especially fierce on the topic of annotation, particularly as practised in the twenty-one volumes of the Boswell and Malone “third variorum” edition (1821). His article sought to debunk the notion that such commentary showed “reverence for the poet” and paid “homage to Shakspeare” (45). According to him a future editor would have an unenviable job: “the task of restoring a text almost hopelessly corrupt” (41). Lewes expressed his revulsion at editorial intervention through a conceit that transformed the idea that Shakespeare's works constitute a “live-long monument”:

The image of annotation as infestation compares textual “corruption” with biological putrefaction. In Lewes's eyes the Shakespearean corpus, eaten away by the foreign bodies at its margins, resembled, not an enduring construction, but a degenerating corpse. In this account of literary decay, only one scholar merited praise for basing himself on the text that emerged from Shakespeare's dramaturgical community: “we . . . applaud Charles Knight's resolute adherence to the first folio, except in cases of typographical error” (49). For readers such as Lewes, the practice of emendation had done more harm than good. Shakespeare commentators had built up a monumental body of work, what Clark, adapting Milton, called “this labour of an age in piled tomes,” yet still the text seemed “hopelessly corrupt” (248). Hence there was widespread excitement when a book discovered in the early 1850s seemed to enable “a genuine restoration of Shakespeare's language in at least a thousand places in which he has been hitherto misunderstood” (Bruce 41).

Collier's Relic

In January 1852, Collier announced the discovery of a precious and fascinating Shakespeare “relic”: a copy of the second folio, previously owned by a man named Thomas Perkins, which included marginal annotations that were apparently of an age with the book (“Early Manuscript Emendations” 144). He publicised these, under the auspices of the Shakespeare Society, in Notes and Emendations to the Text of Shakespeare's Plays, from Early Manuscript Corrections in a Copy of the Folio, 1632 (1852). The following year he issued a revised and enlarged version of the same work, this time presenting the findings as a supplement to a one-volume Shakespeare that incorporated the Perkins “corrections” as authoritative readings. For the next eight years a public quarrel, known as “the Shakespeare Controversy,” surrounded the marginalia's validity. Collier's circle celebrated the discovery of a precious resource: a textual document that, along with the reliable quartos, could be used to correct the folio's readings. Meanwhile more sceptical colleagues and rivals suspected that these revisions were at best conjectures and at worst forgeries. As Collier, like Knight, had a reputation for textual conservatism, those who doubted the authenticity of the find had a difficult task in persuading others.

In their meticulous analysis and dating of these events Arthur and Janet Ing Freeman show how the decisive evidence against Collier was gathered and publicised during the summer of 1859 when the key document, the Perkins folio, received independent examination (1: 718–824). Over May and June Sir Frederic Madden and N. E. S. A. Hamilton, the British Museum's Keeper of Manuscripts and his assistant, reconstructed the forger's modus operandi. Hamilton disseminated their findings in a letter that the Times published on 2 July 1859. The investigators, widening their inquiry, found similar markings on other antiquities that had also passed through Collier's hands. By the time Clement Mansfield Ingleby wrote A Complete View of the Shakspere Controversy (1861), most specialists considered Collier's association with so many discredited antiquities to be compelling evidence of his guilt.Footnote ⁸ Although the Perkins folio has, since then, been notorious as a forgery, its exposure was a gradual process. The Shakespeare controversy began as an argument over whether the readings were conjectural or authoritative; from that contention emerged the subsequent inquiry as to whether they were authentic or spurious.

Many early readers accepted Collier's suggestion that the markings in that second folio were not subsequent conjectures but accurate recordings of lines as read and delivered by the King's Men. In the volume of Notes and Emendations Collier referred to his anonymous note-taker as the “old corrector,” not the old conjecturer: this theatre-going annotator “may have taken the trouble . . . to set right errors in the printed text by the more faithful delivery of their parts by the principal actors”; better still “he may . . . have been aided by the prompt-books” and thus had access to texts antecedent to the printed versions (ix). The margins of Perkins “restored [the] language of Shakespeare” in places where the first folio had misprinted it (xxxiii). Thus, when preparing his 1853 edition, Collier accorded the second folio addenda equal status with the first folio and the early quartos. This version of the Works presented “the text of Shakespeare, as regulated by the old copies and by the emendations in the folio, 1632” (xiii). Nothing in the 1853 edition's layout marked or distinguished those readings which came from the Perkins document.

Conversely, disbelievers argued that the Perkins corrigenda had no more authority than any other post-Shakespearean commentary. No edition, they protested, should be founded on readings which could date from years, perhaps many years, after Shakespeare's death. Just how old was this old corrector? Samuel Weller Singer broached this question when, in Shakespeare Vindicated (1853), he tabulated the suspicious frequency with which these recently discovered annotations coincided with or, according to Collier, pre-empted, the suggestions of well-known eighteenth- and nineteenth-century commentators. Over a thousand of those conjectural emendations were now, to the relief of some and to the distress of others, reclassified under the Collier-Perkins imprimatur as “corrections” or “restorations.” Singer and Knight both realised that Collier's tantalising speculations about the provenance of Perkins's marginalia were imbuing them with a dangerously ambivalent status. This was a second folio text with, perhaps, prompt-book intercalations at its margins; those markings were “emendations,” and so done retrospectively, but they were made by a “corrector” reverting to an earlier state of the text. Collier had planted Perkins in a bibliographical grey area. In 1853 the document was blurring the distinction between the old copies and post-Shakespearean conjecture.

Hence the intensity of the metaphors that Collier's critics applied to those readings even before the proofs of the forgery emerged. For the sake of the textual legacy's integrity those readings needed to be extracted from the textual corpus into which Collier had embedded them. Scholars who had no special reputation for conservatism, such as Singer, began to adopt the language of textual conservation. James F. Ferrier probed the variants in three successive Blackwood's articles from August to October 1853. He concluded that, with a few exceptions, their incorporation would “profane the memory of Shakespeare” (183). Those who suspected, and later knew of, the forgery were more aggressive. Over the rest of the decade a sequence of critics published lengthy examinations of the Perkins annotations: Knight, Singer, Andrew Edmund Brae, and Clement Mansfield Ingleby.Footnote ⁹ Historians of the controversy point out that, of this quartet, all but Ingleby were rival editors and commentators and so had a professional interest in discounting Perkins's authenticity. But whether they wrote from mixed or from pure motives, a significant pattern is visible in their critical rhetoric. The writings shiver with, in Brae's words, “the natural indignation every true lover of Shakespeare must feel at seeing his text so desecrated” (Collier, Notes 122).

Singer, whose own editions appeared in 1826 and 1856, censured Collier in The Text of Shakespeare Vindicated From the Interpolations and Corruptions Advocated by John Payne Collier Esq. In His Notes and Emendations (1853). His preface characterised the alterations as violating Shakespeare's body as well as his body of work. Singer especially regretted that the emendations should be endorsed by a scholar who had hitherto shown “praiseworthy respect for the remains of our great poet, and [who] had been such a staunch defender of the integrity of the old text” (v). In defence of those “remains” Singer knitted together Jonson's elegy, Milton's “On Shakespeare” and the engraving that covers Shakespeare's grave: “Blessed be the man that spares these stones, / And cursed be he that moves my bones”:

Singer's quotations link the corruption of the text to the desecration of the tomb. Within a few years, the gravesite indeed attracted those looking for valuable secrets: a means of analysing the physique that fostered Shakespeare's intellect, a chance to find out what he looked like, or – for the Baconians – some proof of the author's true identity. The special tercentenary issue of Chambers's Journal warned against the resurrectionists who “assert[ed] that, in the interests of physical and moral science, the relics of . . . Shakespeare should be subjected to a thorough examination” (“The Last Years” 20). Collier never proposed exhuming Shakespeare's body but, in Singer's eyes, he had violated the editorial “canons” which taught that “when good sense can be obtained from the old reading it must not be disturbed” (104–05). Knight, moved to expand the prefatory note on the Stratford's text into a supplementary volume, feared that the acceptance of these revisions would undermine the textual basis of his own edition: “our confidence in the original copies has been suddenly disturbed by ‘Emendations’ of a more sweeping character than have been ventured upon since the days of Rowe” (Old Lamps, or New? iv).

One such disturbance, unique to the margins of Perkins, was the alteration of a single vowel in Macbeth as the Thane of Cawdor recoils from the prospect of killing Duncan. In the folio text, Macbeth says that doing the murder would be inhumane, to which Lady Macbeth replies that not doing it would be emasculating:

Perkins replaced “beast” (1.7.47) with “boast”: the change converted a comparison between different understandings of manliness into a contrast between Macbeth's earlier, ruthless words and his current, more cautious actions. Collier's prose depicted such alteration as a form of textual necromancy, through which the old corrector resurrected dead meanings and revived corrupt passages: “this mere substitution of the letter o for the letter e, as it were, magically conjures into palpable existence the long-buried meaning of the poet” (Notes and Emendations xvii).

In reply Singer's quotations, from epitaph and elegy, portray the text as sacrosanct. Milton's poem has pointed relevance to Collier's treatment of his copy of the second folio. Milton's first version appeared among that edition's prefatory material as “An Epitaph on the admirable Dramatic Poet, W. Shakespeare” (1632). Its argument, which adapts the elegiac conceit by redefining the writer's “monument” as the “wonder and astonishment” of his readership, has affiliations to Shakespeare's own idiolect. The OED labels the usage of monument to mean “a carved figure, statue” (2b) as distinctively Shakespearean. Milton's Shakespeare, like some benign Medusa that “make[s] us marble,” metamorphoses his literary audience into a mausoleum of such figurines. This elegy reverses the customary belief that it is people who write on, inscribe, and fill-in books. Instead it envisages a book whose words imprint themselves, “with deep impression,” upon the hearts and minds of its enraptured students. Singer did not directly accuse Collier of forgery, but the quotation from “On Shakespeare” reminds his reader of the proper relationship between the impressing work and the receptive reader. Collier, when he incorporated these changes into his 1853 edition, had behaved like a textual vandal who supposes that “he may re-write, or re-construct any passage which he fancies he can ‘improve’” (xiv).

A. E. Brae, styling himself as an anonymous “detective,” was less circumspect (Literary Cookery 7). He saw chicanery at work both in the margins of Perkins and in Collier's reconstructions, from his own shorthand notes, of Coleridge's Shakespeare lectures of 1811–12. Collier published his Coleridge redaction, which the Freemans and R. A. Foakes accept as genuine, together with a further and more exhaustive enumeration of the Perkins revisions, as Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton by the late S.T. Coleridge. A List of All the MS. Emendations in Mr. Collier's Folio, 1632 (1856).Footnote ¹² By impugning the Lectures, details of which Collier sent to Notes and Queries in 1854, Brae hoped to discredit the Emendations. His principal ambition in publishing Literary Cookery (1855) was as follows:

While it was Ingleby who won a reputation as Collier's public nemesis, it was Brae who imagined the forger's writings as repellent harpies, or perhaps as vultures, ripping the text's heart out. At that time Brae, like Knight, Singer, and other disquieted or suspicious readers, had not examined the Perkins document itself. However his image of a forger hacking away at Shakespeare, “tearing and mangling,” comes close to the cooler prose of the subsequent British Museum report. Hamilton, publicising the forgery in the Times, detailed the perpetrator's attempts to cover his own tracks by obliterating some of the annotations: “sometimes by erasure with a penknife or the employment of chymical [sic] agency, and sometimes by tearing and cutting away parts of the margin” (12).

By 1859 both forensic proofs of the forgery and circumstantial evidence of the culprit's identity were in the public domain. When Ingleby documented the eight-year-long quarrel in A Complete View of the Shakspere Controversy (1861), he was not so much prosecuting the case against Collier, as preserving the dossier of evidence and sequence of events. He too regarded Shakespeare as sacrosanct:

The Biblical comparison suggests that Collier had committed both textual and philological sacrilege. The image of the “fly-blown text” comes from a passage of Dryden's Religio Laici (1682), misquoted by Ingleby, that depicts the emergence of nonconformist sects and dissenting interpretations as an unwelcome side effect of vernacular translations of the Bible.

Dryden depicts the textual corruption of scripture through a powerful metaphorical sequence: the warm[th] of the crowds is sparked by their belief that the “sacred viands” of the holy word will provide spiritual nourishment; in that heated atmosphere, generated by the ardour of the enthusiasts, the text breeds “maggots.” Acceptance of Collier's revisions, Ingleby implied, would corrode the authority of the text and its legitimate guardians. Knight had made a similar attack in Old Lamps, or New? when, ever keen to defend Heminge and Condell's “noble monument to the author's memory,” he protested that henceforward the specialist would be of no more status than the layman in the settling of Shakespeare's texts (xx). The rival editor warned that Collier was “open[ing] . . . floods of conjectural criticism” to a deluge of imitators and effectively “mak[ing] every man his own Shakspere” (xxii). In the weeks following Collier's first announcement, the Athenæum, then his preferred outlet and later his staunchest defender, was indeed swamped by amateur editors who, inspired by “the spirit of correction at work,” put forward their own emendations in the hope of becoming footnotes in the history of Shakespeare's texts (“Our Weekly Gossip” 279–80).

Furthermore Ingleby believed that one of Shakespeare's legacies was the language itself. The Philological Society was at that time drawing up plans for a dictionary that would accurately document the place of Shakespearean idioms in the history of English usage and thus help to distinguish verbal change from textual corruption.Footnote ¹³ Ingleby accorded Shakespeare, along with the translators of the Authorized Version, special status as a source of “pure idiomatic English” (The Shakespeare Fabrications xiv). Hence Collier's corruptions had to be opposed in defence of “the outraged memory of [the] Bard” and the language that he bequeathed (xiv).

Shakespeare's Remains and the 1864 Tercentenary

In 1864 celebrants and mourners continued to gather around the dramatist's physical and literary remains. During the tercentenary year eight different editions appeared or were in progress. Publishers marketed many of them, including John B. Marsh's Reference Shakespeare, as “Memorial Edition[s].” An advertisement in The Publisher's Circular also presented Staunton's photolithographed folio, with its un-annotated pages and antique appearance, as a commemorative publication:

At the same time, a trio of Cambridge academics were presenting Shakespeare in a very different format. Glover and Clark prepared volume one, and Clark and Wright volumes two to nine, of the edition that became known as the “Cambridge Shakespeare” (1863–66). As previously mentioned, the Bookseller imagined the construction of a Shakespearean memorial in which “all the editions of his works and comments upon them were collected and piled up together”: the monumental Cambridge edition achieved something very like that feat. Its textual apparatus included a complete collation of the early quartos and the first folio, along with attributions of every subsequent noteworthy conjecture. For the most part, the Cambridge editors confined those emendations to their annotations. The edition's body-text was, in the main, conservative, being derived from the first folio, sometimes conflated with what Clark and Glover called “Quartos of authority” (I: xi). Later conjectures were only to be admitted into the body text when “the reading of the Folio is altogether impossible” and when “the conjecture . . . appears to us to be the only probable one” (I: xii). In cases where several variant readings merited serious consideration the editors preserved the disputed older reading in the text while encouraging a reader to “make his own selection out of the notes” (I: xii). Clark, if he indeed wrote “Shakespeare, and the new discovery,” had largely welcomed the Perkins emendations when Collier first publicised them. Now they were included among the notes with the neutral attribution “Collier MS.” The edition's introduction refrained from comment on their authenticity.

The simultaneous appearance of the Cambridge edition and Staunton's first folio prompted William Arrowsmith, a cleric and amateur textual critic, to write Shakespeare's Editors and Commentators (1865), a work that added to the growing mid-Victorian literature on the history of Shakespeare editing. Arrowsmith was a textual conservative; prior to the British Museum's revelations he had gone into print against Collier's revisions in The Editor of “Notes and Queries” and his friend, Mr. Singer (1858). In that publication the Perkins emendations bore the brunt of Arrowsmith's general attack upon unnecessary alterations of the first folio. The 1865 book illustrates how, in the mind of one informed reader, the Shakespeare controversy had discredited emendation per se. In it Arrowsmith drew a stark contrast between the Cambridge Shakespeare and Staunton's reprint. The reproduced folio delighted him by reconstituting a text cleansed of later commentary and annotation: “it is a great treat to ramble over the Folio, photolithographed by Day, without let or rub of notes, wherewith . . . the critic has overlaid and depraved so many editions of the greatest poet of the world” (8). But while he “rambl[ed] over the Folio,” Arrowsmith got bogged down in the Cambridge footnotes. For him, Collier was not a loose cannon, but “the representative and ringleader” of a gang of textual desecrators (33). Zachariah Jackson, Andrew Becket, Collier . . . for Arrowsmith they were all the same. Shakespeare's words, in the Cambridge volumes, were “overlaid and depraved” with excrescences and interpolations. The critic compared the texts of the old copies to other Shakespearean relics that had been restored or, as he thought, vandalised:

When Arrowsmith wrote those words he had in mind the histories surrounding Shakespeare's memorials as well as his works. Each of the Cambridge volumes bore a gilt image, in profile, of the Stratford bust. Perhaps it was this illustration that prompted Arrowsmith to compare editorial intervention in the text with the wear and tear undergone by the monument. Both the effigy and the text had been “plaster[ed] and daub[ed],” on one occasion by the same hand. Arrowsmith's accusation alludes to how Malone persuaded the vicar of Stratford to have the bust whitewashed, before the original colours were restored in 1861. In Arrowsmith's imagination those layers of paint are metaphors for the ways in which emendators coat Shakespeare's text with their own handiwork. Arrowsmith's prose also alludes to a second incident in the bust's history. In the 1840s an entrepreneurial stone mason named Will Warner surreptitiously took and marketed a cast of the sculpture, an event that inspired Wilkie Collins's Christmas book Mr Wray's Cash Box (1851). Collins's mason manufactures a plaster-of-Paris mask of Shakespeare's face through which anyone, for a guinea fee, can consecrate part of their own home to Shakespeare's memory. The tale implicitly treats the replica's fabrication as one of the processes that were putting a growing popular audience in touch with Shakespeare and Shakespeariana. Reuben Wray believes in the tradition that the bust, being taken from Shakespeare's death mask, is an authentic likeness of the author.

For Arrowsmith, editorial “plaster[ing]” of Shakespeare had a very different significance. He compared the production of that replica image to the editorial creation of an ersatz Shakespeare. According to him the contrast between the folio text and its modern derivatives was as marked as the choice with which Hamlet confronts Gertrude when he urges her to “Look here, upon this picture, and on this, / The counterfeit presentment of two brothers” (III.4.53). Unwarranted updating of Shakespeare's lexis and spelling had fostered a mid-nineteenth-century readership who wanted “Shakespeare accommodated to modern parlance, or recast in the grotesque mould of a Jackson or a Becket” (22).

In describing the state of the text Arrowsmith also alludes to the condition of the Stratford birthplace. The Cambridge editors were punctilious in attributing conjectures to those who first proposed them. In Arrowsmith's mind their pages, “bescribbl[ed] . . . all over with [the] names” of commentators, were smothered in graffiti akin to the writing that then covered the birthplace. This, for instance, was how All the Year Round's Tercentenary reporter depicted the Henley Street natal chamber:

Both of these images of a scrawled-over Shakespeare resemble a Punch cartoon, “Shakspeare and the Pigmies” (30 January 1864) (Figure 28), that satirised the tercentenary as an opportunity for the advancement and self-promotion of its organisers. The drawing depicts the Stratford bust with, at its base, a crowd of midgets positioning themselves to tag the memorial with their names. As in the All the Year Round article, generic figures like Brown and Jones are prominent offenders. One homunculus, with the advantage of a ladder, decorates the plinth with the insignia of the Athenæum, a journal strongly associated with the Tercentenary campaign. Another Lilliputian billposter pastes on an advertisement for the London Committee of the Shakspere Memorial campaign. Arrowsmith regarded the commentators that he hated, “Jackson,” “Becket,” and “Collier,” as the scholarly counterparts of these Pygmies.

Figure 28. Anon., “Shakspeare and the Pigmies.” Illustration from Punch (30 Jan.1864): 44. Courtesy of the English Faculty Library, Cambridge University.

Arrowsmith turned a quotation from one of Shakespeare's texts against its editors. Hamlet, most notably its title-character, repeatedly ponders the changes that great men's bodies undergo after death. The Prince contemplates how a beggar can digest a king, how Alexander's dust might cork a beer-barrel, and how Caesar's clay could patch up a wall. For Arrowsmith, one of those observations, made in response to the gravedigger's careless treatment of human remains, summed up editorial interference in Shakespeare's text: “thus does every one ‘play at loggats’ with Shakespeare's remains” (40).Footnote ¹⁶ The Prince utters those words as he compares the possible personal history of one of the body-parts, which might once have belonged to “my lord such-a-one” (V.1.81), with the indignities that they now suffer:

In Arrowsmith's mind, revisers had manhandled the corpus as roughly as the gravedigger treats that corpse.

Posterity did not endorse Arrowsmith's valuation of the Cambridge Shakespeare. Its collation, the very feature that Arrowsmith attacked, is still admired. Today its editors are remembered for accurately recording the changes Shakespeare's writings underwent over the course of two-and-a-half centuries. The Cambridge's apparatus, writes Gary Taylor, “correctly established, in all but a handful of problematic cases, the genetic relationship between earlier editions” (188). However, on its first appearance Clark and Wright's construction of that editorial genealogy coincided with critical laments about the history of textual transmission. In the mid-nineteenth century the emendations recorded in their monumental edition were often seen as forms of desecration.