Where to Begin?

This chapter begins by considering the problem of editing Shakespeare’s texts and how error is cast within them. Stephen Orgel identifies the most basic assumption of editing as ‘that the correct text is the author’s final manuscript...We assume in short that the authority of a text derives from the author. Self evident as it may appear, I suggest that this proposition is not true: in the case or renaissance dramatic texts it is almost never true.’1

When this is compared to Barbara Mowat’s claim that ‘the idea of “authorial intention” is, for many editors, at the heart of the editorial project’, it reveals a tension between how the editor positions the author and how the author should be positioned in the text.2 Orgel argues that the ‘correct’ text is not the text that derives from the author yet for Mowat this assumption is foundational. The implications of rejecting attempts to discern the author’s original script altogether would be radical and severe but it is possible, at least, to show that the notion of a singular ‘correct’ text is an editorial construction. There is insufficient evidence to determine a text’s fidelity to the original source, and therefore claims to authenticity are frequently based on conjecture. It is in the nature of this editorial process that error cannot be completely excised; the process itself is epistemologically limited when the original manuscript is the yardstick of correctness. This lack of evidence means that the determination of error is fuzzy, and errors cannot be identified with certainty.

The powerful ideology of authorial intention co-opts a moral discourse for its own legitimation: the ‘correct’ reading is still the one thought most likely to be ‘Shakespeare’. On the other hand, ‘bad’ quartos are often explained as being so

1

Stephen Orgel, The Authentic Shakespeare and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 1.

2 _{Barbara Mowat, ‘The Problem of Shakespeare’s Text(s)’ in Textual Formations and Reformations,}

eds., Laurie Maguire and Thomas Berger, (London: Associated University Presses, 1998), 131-48, p. 139.

because of interference from the theatre (being adapted from performance, deriving from a prompt book or being memorially reconstructed from the mind of an actor) or from the printing house (being scribal or compositorial error).3 Orgel outlines the myth that the aesthetically best text is that most loyal to Shakespeare’s original manuscript: ‘The notion that a bad poem cannot be by Shakespeare is a very old one, and it involves a strategy of definition: it defines Shakespeare as the best poet, and then banishes from the canon whatever is considered insufficiently excellent.’4

This is the romance of origins – Shakespeare’s genius comes in part from subsequent editorial judgements of excellence, since these set the standards by which authenticity is judged. Orgel, discussing the difficulty of remaining true to ‘the genuine obscurity, even incomprehensibility, of some of the text’, admits that ‘my basic feeling as an editor is that texts aren’t ideas, they are artefacts, and I want to preserve as much as I can of their archaeology’.5 The textual ‘obscurity’ to which Orgel refers are the parts without origin. Conversely his interest in the ‘archaeology’ of the text reveals his own investment in the power-origin he is struggling to resist— to edit the Shakespearean text as an artefact rather than an object very closely associated with Shakespeare.

A focus on origins and Orgel’s simultaneous resistance and attraction to them can be elucidated through Jacques Derrida’s use of ‘arche’ or ‘arche-writing’.

‘Arche’ comes from the prefix ‘arch-’ from the Greek άρχή, meaning beginning, origin, as demonstrated in ‘archaeology’: the search for the origins of history. ‘Arch-’ also means chief or principle, as in ‘archbishop’, and the suffix ‘-arch’ denotes ultimate rule, as in ‘patriarch’. The early uses of this word and morpheme

3 _{See Laurie Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The Bad Quartos and Their Contexts}

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

4 _{Orgel, The Authentic Shakespeare, p. 232.} 5

connect the origin with power. But the origin of something is often as opaque as it is important, demonstrated in the Aristotelian dictum that nothing can come of

nothing—‘ex nihilo nihil fit’. Derrida expands on this dictum that the origin has no beginning in his reference to ‘arche-writing’. ‘To think the unique within the system, to inscribe it there, such is the gesture of the arche-writing: arche-violence, loss of the proper, of absolute proximity, of self-presence, in truth the loss of what has never taken place, of a self-presence which has never been given but only dreamed of and always already split, repeated, incapable of appearing to itself except in its own disappearance.’6

The ‘loss of what has never taken place’ is the loss of the origin that never was – it only appears as it disappears. Thinking of arche or the origin as

simultaneously appearing and disappearing negates or at least disturbs the origin of the Shakespearean text for which editorial method still frequently strives.

‘Archery’, a cognate of ‘arche’, is the practice of finding the centre. It works under the conceptual model that privileges the origin and the centre, where the aim of the sport is to pierce the concentric circles and middle point. The OED gives the word-origin from the Latin arcus bow, forgetting the earlier Greek origin which ties the origin to power, preferring the Apolline beauty of the curve and seeing that shape in the archer’s tool. The earliest use of ‘arch’ comes from ‘The Court of Arches’ which was the Court of Appeal of the Archbishop of Canterbury.7 It is ambiguous whether the ‘arch’ refers to the architectural arches of the church where the court was held, or to the arches or rulers who presided there. The contiguity of power and origin is revealed this time in the history of ‘arch’. The OED states that the former was the original meaning of the word but this focus on bow and curve from the Latin

6 _{Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins}

University Press, 1997), p. 112.

7

obscures the proximity to power inherent in the earlier Greek word.8 The Latin cognate, in its relation to bow, reveals the desire to discover, order and control the origin, whereas the Greek points not only to beginnings but to power. Between the Greek and the Latin there is the struggle between the Dionysian disorder and the Apolline order.9 It is the Greek power-origin on which Derrida draws in his reference to ‘arche-writing’, rather than the Latin ordered and discoverable origin, and in doing so he denies the truth of the unique subject at an originary centre.10 In the present context, this amounts to the denial that Shakespeare, as a unique subject, is the sole originator and aesthetic standard for the texts we now ascribe to him. ‘Where to begin?’ is as much a question of where an editor should start given these

methodological and conceptual textual problems, as a question of beginnings in general—where is the origin: can we create one or how can we edit without a beginning?