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Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist

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This book has totally changed the way I think about Shakespeare. Erne absolutely demolishes an entire tradition of Shakespeare scholarship: i.e.,that Shakespeare wrote only for the stage and did not care about the publication or literary afterlife of his plays. Erne reminds us that Renaissance stage performances were approximately 2 hours long, 2 ½ at most. And even at performance speeds far exceeding modern standards, the maximum number of lines that could be acted in 2 ½ hours is 2500. Yet no less than 28 out of Shakespeare's 37 plays are over 2700 lines! Why did Shakespeare write such long plays that could not be acted on the stage? Erne argues convincingly that he wrote the long versions for publication and then abridged them for stage performance. The so-called "bad quartos" of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Henry V represent acting versions of the longer folio versions. The quarto versions of the plays were published by Shakespeare and the acting company; they were not stolen by spectators with notebooks, or reconstructed later by actors. Likewise, Erne argues that Shakespeare himself planned the folio text, even though he never lived to see it through to publication. In sum, Shakespeare was self-conscious literary artist, well aware of the literary value of his plays, who wrote his plays both as literature to be read and as scripts to be performed.

Perhaps the most elegantly argued study of Shakespeare since A. D. Nuttall's New Mimesis, Lukas Erne's exploration of Shakespeare not only as a playwright but as a literary dramatist is a profound study of textual history. The groundbreaking argument in Erne's work is that Shakespeare not only wrote for the stage but self-consciously for the reader also. This might sound apparent, yet nowadays it is so out of fashion, mainly thanks to Oxfordian performance criticism, that this is an impressive undertaking not only because it deals with now-unfashionable possibilities, it does so by intelligence rather than pompousness.

The study is divided into two parts, "Publication" and "Texts". The first part is a thorough analysis of the Elizabethan-Jacobian playbooks, and here Erne forwards his innovative argument that the Lord Chamberlain's men actively seeked to publish Shakespeare's plays in the 1590s. Erne examines a wide range of texts and also investigates the birth of the dramatic "author", often attributed to Ben Johnson with the publication of his "Workes" in 1616; Erne places it to the early 1590s and traces early quartos and the development of the quarto title pages in the way they exhibit the author's name, starting from the initials to the full name in display.

The latter part in great deal demolishes many long-standing assumptions, especially attacking the Oxford editors in the performance criticism they practice. He surmises, in great detail, the length of the performances and the implications this length has on the texts that were performed during Shakespeare's time (he shows that it was not possible that most of Shakespeare's plays were performed unabridged - this is, for example, the stance of the Oxford editors). He also puts forth convincing arguments as to the true origins and functions of the so-called "bad" quartos such as the 1603 Q1 Hamlet - he also deals with the early quarto of "Henry V" and "Romeo and Juliet", the latter which he also edited for the New Cambridge Series. You will never read the so-called "bad" quartos in the same light again after reading this book, and it will surely enrich your reading experience of the whole canon. I, for one, am now ever as glad for the Arden (third series) Hamlet that provides us with both quartos and the Folio, and the New Cambridge Early Quartos Series, as Erne convincingly shows that there is something much more penetrating in the quartos that have been generally accepted.

In short, this is a convincingly argued and thoroughly researched study. Not only is it informatively written and thought-provokingly truism-shattering, his style is refreshingly proleptic without never being imperious. Along the way he utterly destroys long-held "academic" theories and lays new ground, in the footsteps of Peter W. M. Blayney, to an exciting future of Shakespearen textual criticism. What is the most convincing aspect of his writing is that he does all this soberly and never allows himself, no matter how innovative, to use such a graveyard of a word, his insights be, to provide us with an argument either with Bloomian pompousness or the kind of leaps of faith that the Oxford editors (Taylor, Wells et al.) amply entertain us with and assume that we as readers should take. This is level-headed criticism that is interested in the facts, and when crossing the line and entering the realm of hypothesis clearly states it accordingly. He does not abandon factual evidence if unfit for his argument but is strikingly honest: when a hypothesis is mostly just that, he tells us so - I suppose this is the commodity of only the most learned men. He also offers some wonderful insight into the structure of the three plays, in particular in how the dynamics of "Hamlet" change in the three versions we now have.

If you are discouraged by the rather steep price for the paperback edition, please do not be, as the riches are manifold. This is also required reading for anyone considering buying the Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works.

Five stars to a study whose only fault is that it is too short.

With best regards,
Antti