Lynch - Becoming Shakespeare: the Unlikely Afterlife That Turned a Provincial Playwright into the Bard

Becoming Shakespeare

THE UNLIKELY AFTERLIFE THAT TURNED A
PROVINCIAL PLAYWRIGHT INTO THE BARD

Jack Lynch

Copyright 2007 by John T. Lynch

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eISBN: 978-0-802-71867-9

Art credits: courtesy of the Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library, University of Pennsylvania. Courtesy of the Edwin Forrest Collection, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania. Courtesy of Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries. Courtesy of the Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia. Courtesy of the Singer-Mendenhall Collection, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.

First U.S. edition 2007
Electronic edition published in 2007

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When I quote Shakespeare I normally use the Oxford Shakespeare of 1986, in which the editors, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, have modernized the spelling and punctuation (though I use the familiar traditional titles of the plays). When I quote other editions I say so. In most of the quotations from other authors, I've followed the original spelling and punctuation of my sources, with only minimal modernization. At first the older forms of the language may seem alien, but I hope the original spelling gives some of the flavor of the times. Besides, as Samuel Johnson wrote, "If phraseology is to be changed as words grow uncouth by disuse,... the history of every language will be lost; we shall no longer have the words of any authour."

A few tips will make it easy to decode the older quotations, and soon it will become second nature. First, until the middle of the nineteenth century, the spelling of Shakespeare's name was variable; it will be spelled many ways here, as Shakespeare, Shakespear,Shakspeare, Shakspere, and so on. (There were even early spellings like Shagspere and Shaxberd; the critic E. K. Chambers tallied eighty-three recorded spellings.) The same sort of variation occurred in other words, any of which might have had a half-dozen legitimate spellings, even in a single book. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the letters U and V were in some places interchangeable; ditto I and Jthus vniuersal sometimes appears for universal, and John is sometimes spelled lohn. Consonants were often doubled willy-nilly, and silent e's were more common than they are now. Et cetera was often abbreviated &c (the ampersand, &, was originally a scribal shorthand for the Latin et). Older rules for capitalization and italics were also different from ours. Decoding old handwriting is a little more complicated, since it often used abbreviationsyeand ytfor instance, for the and that. Note that all of these oddities affect just spelling, not pronunciation: ye was pronounced "the," never "ye/' just as vniuersal was pronounced "universal."

I did, however, make a few changes where the older typography threatened to pose real problems for comprehension. First, I changed the long s, the one that looks to modern eyes like an I, to the more familiar short form; I turned VV into a modern W; I eliminated "running quotation marks"; and I expanded a few abbreviationssome early sources omitted n's after vowels, replacing them with marks over the vowels: Getleme, for instance, which I present as Gentlemen. And I print underscored passages in manuscripts as italics. Everything else, though, is presented as the authors wrote it, with the occasional clarification supplied in [square brackets].