Table Of ContentUNCONFORMITIES IN SHAKESPEARE'S
LATER COMEDIES
Also by Kristian Smidt
"'UNCONFORMITIES IN SHAKESPEARE'S HISTORY PLAYS
"'UNCONFORMITIES IN SHAKESPEARE'S
EARLY COMEDIES
"'UNCONFORMITIES IN SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGEDIES
INIURIOUS IMPOSTERS AND RICHARD ill
MEMORIAL TRANSMISSION AND QUARTO COPY IN
RICHARD ill
1HE TRAGEDY OF KING RICHARD ill: PARALLEL TEXTS
(editor)
POETRY AND BELIEF IN 1HE WORK OF T. S. ELIOT
1HE IMPORTANCE OF RECOGNITION:
SIX CHAPTERS ON T. S. ELIOT
JAMES JOYCE AND 1HE CULTIC USE OF FICTION
'" Also from Palgrave Macmillan
Unconfonnilies in
Shakespeare's Later
Conte dies
Kristian Smidt
Emeritus Professor of English Literature
University of Oslo
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-1-349-13065-8 ISBN 978-1-349-13063-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-13063-4
© Kristian Smidt 1993
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 18t edition 1993 978-0-333-58450-7
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue,
New York. N.Y. 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1993
ISBN 978-0-312-09099-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smidt, Kristian.
Unconformities in Shakespeare's later comedies / Kristian Smidt.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-09099-9
1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616---Comedies. 2. Comedy.
I. Title.
PR2981.S565 1993
822.3'3-dc20 92-37355
CIP
For my Shakespeare friends in Japan
Contents
Preface viii
1 Introduction 1
2 Against the Bridal Day 22
3 All Even in Arden? 46
4 Or, What You Will 62
5 Dark Doings in Tuscany 76
6 The Divided World of Vienna 92
7 Fortune Against Life-Force: The Pagan World of Pericles 107
8 Romance and Realism in Cymbeline 124
9 Like an Old Tale 135
10 Prospero's Project 145
11 Conclusion 162
Appendix 174
Notes 186
Bibliography 223
Index 232
vii
Preface
This is the fourth and last volume of a series in which I have con-
ducted an analysis of all the plays in the Shakespeare canon. Only
one play partly attributed to Shakespeare has been omitted. The
Two Noble Kinsmen, whether or not because Fletcher had the
smoothing-out of the composite parts, offers relatively little of
interest to a study of 'unconformities'.
The term 'unconformities' may be thought more pejorative than I
intend, but, as I have explained before and repeat in the
Introduction to the present volume, I have found it useful, with
some stretching of its original geological meaning, to designate the
breaches of continuity or consistency occurring in the play texts for
whatever genetic reasons. In many cases, and this is why they may
be worth studying, they direct us to thought processes which
shaped and inform the plays as we have them, both in major
aspects and minor matters, and help us besides to recognise acci-
dental corruptions for what they are.
I do not pretend to be the first to discover all these unconformi-
ties. In fact most of them have been observed and pointed out by
critics from the seventeenth century on. Dryden mentioned Measure
for Measure as one of several plays made up, as he complained, 'of
some ridiculous incoherent story' (Essay on the Dramatique Poetry of
the Last Age). And, naturally, editors of the plays, particularly in our
own century, have been attentive to irregularities of various kinds,
some of which they have amended. Lists of inconsistencies appear
in the introductions to a number of modem editions and have occa-
sionally simplified my own survey. Nevertheless, even major
unconformities may sometimes have gone unnoticed, and certain
types of irregularity, like redundant repetition (often signalling real
or intended omissions and additions, as I shall show), have too
seldom been identified (see also the Appendix). Some of my obser-
vations therefore are new. And at least there may be some merit in
bringing them together from all the plays. Seeing the unconformi-
ties systematically demonstrated and discussed should help to
bring certain prevalent tendencies of Shakespeare's work into
clearer view.
What I am basically concerned with are phenomena, not ideas
viii
Preface ix
except as parts of phenomena, and to a great extent I would leave it
to others' endeavours to place my objective observations in larger
theoretical or evaluative contexts. Phenomena need to be simply
described. In any case I am, regrettably or not, incapable of reason-
ing on the level of abstraction to be found in much recent academic
discourse. Further, if my identification of phenomena sometimes
may seem indiscriminate, this, I submit, is because it is impossible
to fill in the whole background of surprise effects in Shakespeare
which are not considered as unconformities.
The reproach that I most anticipate and would wish to forestall is
that I have too exclusively examined the play texts as literature and
have not sufficiently considered their theatrical intentions. It seems
to me that bardolatry nowadays is becoming sectarian, and the the-
atrical sect is especially loud in its denunciation of heretics.
Shakespeare has truly become an idol of the theatre. In a recent
symposium of essays and interviews, The Shakespeare .M yth
(ed. G. Holderness, Manchester University Press, 1988), Michael
Bogdanov says of Shakespeare: 'He wasn't literature; he was
theatre. His work became literature later on when people tran-
scribed his plays on to paper.' 'This dreadful tradition', he calls it.
And John Hodgson declares: 'The root of the problem is that
Shakespeare has become literature. The danger occurs when we
forget that Shakespeare was a man of the theatre; he was an actor
who also happened to write plays.'
It is time to oppose this increasingly manic denial of
Shakespeare's literary significance. Whatever Bogdanov may think,
the plays were written before they were performed and, what is
more, written by a poet who certainly could not expect his every
line to be spoken on the stage, let alone to be fully appreciated on a
first hearing. Some of his plays were printed and published in cor-
rected versions after being first 'maimed, and deformed by. .. iniuri-
ous impostors'. And for all we know he may himself have wished
to publish them all before he died. Need we believe that Francis
Meres had only seen and heard, not read them, when he compared
them for excellence to those of Plautus and Seneca; or Gabriel
Harvey when he said of Lucrece and Hamlet that they 'haue it in
them, to please the wiser sort'? In any case, we do as a matter of
plain fact possess them as literature and are quite capable of enjoy-
ing their literary as well as their theatrical qualities.
On the other hand, the Romantics were mistaken, of course, in
wishing only to read the plays and to be spared the experience,
x Preface
limiting in their minds, of watching them performed. I am in no
way denying that the plays were destined for the theatre. Some of
them, probably, were written hastily and for special occasions. And
the present study is theatre-oriented, not because it is concerned
with the stage histories of the plays or particularly focused on the-
atrical interpretations at various times but because it addresses
itself to problems which directors and actors at any time have to
face and solve. It also attempts to determine more precisely than
has hitherto been done in all cases the contents of the scripts used
for the earliest productions (e.g. what omissions were intended)
and in what ways the texts may have been adapted for perfor-
mance. A large part of my efforts will be directed towards discover-
ing by means of recognisable signs what changes the author made
in his notional plots or already-written texts, changes which would
frequently have been motivated by his wish to improve the effect of
presentation on the stage. It is in ways like this, I submit, that aca-
demic critics, so often dismissed or denigrated by theatre people
(see e.g. M. Billington (ed.), Directors' Shakespeare, Nick Hern, 1990,
pp. 114-17) may be of service to practical interpreters of drama.
It had no doubt been a thing worthy to have been wished to have
seen a play directed by the author himself in his own theatre. This
would have been of immense importance in deciding a great many
questions concerning ultimate intentions and in supplementing the
stage directions recorded in print. Even in Shakespeare's own day,
however, a performance must have been an interpretation which
realised some of the play's potentials, but not all. Productions in
later times lacking the benefit of the author's supervision are even
less definitive but may still be illuminating, not least as regards the
viability of particular emphases or inclusions. Analysis of the texts
must be open to experiential evidence but cannot be governed by it.
Thus it is no doubt possible to make the Jupiter scene in Cymbeline
seem significant when enacted, but my argument that it is both
detachable and expendable is not shaken in principle by the fact
that reviewers missed it in a recent production (see Smallwood
in Shakespeare Quarterly, Spring 1990, p. 104, and Dessen in SQ,
Fall 1990, pp. 352-3) - perhaps the audience was bemused by the
fact that the theophany was given in dumb show only. Some uncon-
formities are also hard to eliminate or disguise. Kenneth Branagh's
splendid Twelfth Night did nothing to remove (though it did a lot to
compensate for) the absurdity of Viola not acting on her realisation
that she was taken for Sebastian.
