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Our penchant these days for popularized modern texts of the Elizabethan drama without apparatus has in some part concealed a worrisome problem felt most keenly by the original-text, or old-spelling, editor. This problem concerns not only the degree but also the kind of editorial interference with the 'accidentals' of the original, particularly with the punctuation, that is required if a critical reading edition and not a simple diplomatic transcript is to be formulated. This latter is no longer fashionable save for early dramatic manuscripts, but the old-spelling reading edition is comparatively alive and well. The attention needed to clean up the usual carelessly printed dramatic text is not confined to the accidentals, of course. The more important editorial function remains the emendation of the substantives, or words, the basic building blocks in the transfer of meaning. Nevertheless, although similar problems posed by ambiguity or error in textual accidentals are constantly encountered in the editing of early dramatic texts, they have been subject to less critical attention than questions of corrupt wording on which any reader may form a personal opinion, whether impressionistically or logically derived. Indeed, by this time for Shakespeare—except perhaps in the sometimes erratic new Oxford edition—the number of editorial disagreements among the substantives is not very large for most single-text plays. In contrast, the usually hidden editorial disagreements about meaningful accidentals are more frequent though less recognized; hence, paradoxically, what I call semi-substantives are now of
The editor of an old-spelling Elizabethan play needs to come to terms at the start with the problem of faulty or inadequate punctuation, this being his chief concern among the accidentals. His is a delicate operation. In Renaissance texts dramatic punctuation can vary widely between play and play, printing shop and shop, compositor and compositor, and certainly date and date. Some early texts are unevenly over-punctuated, generally by the imposition of artificial rules; others may be too lightly pointed for normal recognition of the syntax and its meaning without close study. Most plays are mixed.
The editor of a modernized text confronts only the problem of enforcing his concept of present-day syntactical punctuation on the sometimes alien rhetorical system of the original. The imposed style will change according to the era of the new edition and the flair of the editor, and in that sense 'modernized' is at best a comparative term. Before the turn of the century, and for some years after, a heavy and conventional system was the norm, marked by scrupulous setting-off by commas of any word, phrase, or clause that seemed to the slightest degree parenthetical or appositive. And it was a curse of the time to sprinkle quite uncharacteristic exclamation marks liberally throughout the text, so much so, in fact, that one character could scarcely say good morning to another without making it an exclamation.[2] Those days are fortunately gone although their memory may linger still when a marked-up text is insufficiently purged. Indeed, there is no guarantee that whatever system a modernizing editor adopts will not in its turn lose its contemporaneous feel and eventually join the ranks of the old-fashioned. That is not a problem I am addressing at the moment, however. (One need only remark that a modernizing editor is advised to use a light punctuation system that best maintains the flow of the verse, as likely to be the longer lasting.[3]) Moreover, an attempt to mix purely syntactical alterations with remnants of the old rhetorical system may be confusing to a reader accustomed to a strictly modern texture. A modernizing editor is expected to modernize albeit with discretion in those numerous cases when the older syntax resists the imposition of contemporary standards and some compromise is needed.
The problem facing an old-spelling, or original-text, editor differs materially. The reader of such a text is necessarily in some part sophisticated in the ways of Elizabethan spelling, grammar, syntax, and punctuation and therefore can follow with comparative ease the intent of non-syntactical pointing when it is itself not only faithful to its period but also relatively consistent in its terms. When we consider, for example, the relative weight of the semicolon and colon, the following passage from Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII [4] causes no problem:
To sit heere at this present, and behold
That Chayre stand empty: But we all are men
Of our flesh, few are Angels; out of which frailty [3060]
And want of wisedome, you that best should teach us,
Have misdemean'd your selfe, and not a little:
Toward the King first, then his Lawes, in filling
The whole Realme, by your teaching and your chaplaines
(For so we are inform'd) with new opinions, [3065]
Divers and dangerous; which are Heresies;
And not reform'd, may prove pernicious.
V.ii.42-53 (TLN 3056-67)
Nevertheless, occasional problems arise when conventions of punctuation sometimes met with in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries clash with the rhetorical flow of meaning and thus tend to cancel out the effectiveness for modern comprehension of less structural pointing. One such is the tendency among compositors to place a comma almost automatically at the end of a verse-line. Ordinarily only slight harm (if any) may be done by this convention even though it may obscure the syntactical relationship of run-on lines.[6] More annoyingly, a convention that the caesural pause in a pentameter may be marked by a comma serves to thwart the syntactical (or even rhetorical) basis for a reader's comprehension until the convention is recognized in a text and accepted for what it is.[7] Yet such conventions of punctuation—especially if their occasion is exacerbated by inconsistency of usage—can so distort the meaning as to require emendation even in an unmodernized text. For example, in the Folio Henry VIII when Lord Sands is revving up his wit at Wolsey's banquet, he answers Anne Bullen's light-hearted query whether his father was mad by replying:
But he would bite none, just as I doe now,
He would Kisse you Twenty with a breath.
I.iv.28-30 (701-703)
A reverse case comes when the Duke of Norfolk is describing the Field of the Cloth of Gold:
Became the next dayes master, till the last
Made former Wonders, it's. To day the French,
All Clinquant all in Gold, like Heathen Gods
Shone downe the English; . . .
I.i.16-20 (60-64)
A relatively common misreading of the syntax caused by the confusion of caesural and line-ending comma comes in King Henry's expostulation that Wolsey's special tax will destroy the fabric of the country, creating a true semi-substantive error:
And sticke them in our Will. Sixt part of each?
A trembling Contribution; why we take
From every Tree, lop, barke, and part o'th' Timber:
And though we leave it with a roote thus hackt,
The Ayre will drinke the Sap.
I.ii.93-98 (429-433)
A more delicate example of such an exchange comes a little earlier in Wolsey's defense of his actions:
By sicke Interpreters (once weake ones) is
Not ours, or not allow'd; what worst, as oft
Hitting a grosser quality, is cride up
For our best Act: . . .
I.ii.81-85 (416-420)
These simple illustrations of compositorial misunderstanding of whatever was the manuscript pointing, if any, definitely affect the sense by the misrepresentation of the syntactical signs that even in Elizabethan days would properly have been used to indicate the verbal meaning that would follow the correct structural relationship of words, phrases, clauses; that is, specifically, the grammatical modification of elements essential to the transfer of the intended sense. To the extent that they do corrupt meaning by producing false modification, they go at least a step beyond the ordinary run-of-the-mine faulty or inept punctuation that presents difficulties in the accidentals of seventeenth-century dramatic texts.
It is customary to distinguish these accidentals of texture from essential meaning conveyed by the words themselves, that is, the substantives. But any editor will recognize that words derive meaning not only from their roots but also from their relationship to other words. When this relationship is obscured or even positively distorted, the essential meaning of the words, either in themselves or joined in phrases and clauses, may be as effectively altered as though different words had been used that an editor must emend.[11] In short, faulty punctuation can affect meaning in a substantive manner on the same level as the verbal signs. With some hesitation I use the term 'semi-substantives' to apply to these important punctuational signs[12] which merit as much editorial consideration as warranted by the selection from among faulty or variant textual verbals.
Editors (and readers) familiar with erratic early punctuation may have no particular difficulty in deciding whether Lord Sands was biting or kissing like his father, or whether it was the heathen gods or else the French who outshone the English, although the ambiguity is sufficient to warrant straightening out by emendation. In a literal sense an argument can be pressed that such passages are semi-substantive in their effect on meaning. This effect is not unimportant, but insofar as there may usually be general agreement among editors as to the way to solve the problems such passages offer, they do not ordinarily qualify as cruxes, which I take roughly to identify significant editorial disagreement as to the readings that should be adopted to repair substantive damage. For purely practical purposes, in this paper, then, I should like to emphasize the sense in which the term semi-substantives can be narrowly applied to accidentals (chiefly but not exclusively punctuation) that create cruxes whereby editors of the original documents are led to disagree about the sense produced by the copy-text, and so whether emendation of the accidentals is necessary (or whether re-interpretation of the original is possible), and if emendation is necessary what is the best procedure to straighten out the difficulty and resolve the crux.[13]
I offer as samples of significant semi-substance cruxes several weightier problems from Henry VIII in addition to the hacked root. The first is one
(If you have any Justice, any Pitty,
If ye be any thing but Churchmens habits)
Put my sicke cause into his hands, that hates me?
Alas, ha's banish'd me his Bed already,
His Love, too long ago. I am old my lords, . . .
III.i.115-120 (1746-51)
A slenderer example of semi-substantive pointing may be mentioned. A recently raised crux comes early in Henry VIII when Abergavenny is expostulating that Wolsey's own letter laid a heavy charge on a number of individuals to contribute to the expenses of the Field of the Cloth of Gold:
Of all the Gentry; for the most part such
To whom as great a Charge, as little Honor
He meant to lay upon: and his owne Letter
The honourable Boord of Councell, out [130]
Must fetch him in, [whom] he Papers.
I.i.75-80 (126-131)
As I see it, the question revolves on whether 'out' is an adverb, the sense being his letter being sent out, fetches in the recipient, or whether it is a preposition, the letter being Wolsey's own, without the knowledge or consent of the council, required the recipient to agree. This latter has been the common reading, which necessitates the transposition of the Folio comma from 'Councell' to 'out'. In either case it is acknowledged that the general sense requires Wolsey's letter to have substituted for the authority of the council, but the clarity of the usual emendation is superior since it baldly states that the letter was without the approval of the council, whereas only an inference is present, if the Folio punctuation is retained, that the letter and the council were one—that Wolsey usurped the authority of the council. Such a delicacy would be difficult to put across on the stage[14] and seems to represent an over-ingenious way of defending the faulty Folio punctuation.
In another case, however, the Folio punctuation and syntax can be defended against emending editors. Describing Wolsey's death to Katherine, her man Griffith begins:
Though from an humble Stocke, undoubtedly
Was fashion'd to much Honor. From his Cradle
He was a Scholler, and a ripe, and good one:
IV.ii.48-51 (2606-9)
A more important example involves the establishment and application of an Elizabethan idiom. Suffolk and Norfolk, having just been dismissed the royal presence on the entrance of Wolsey with Campeius, exchange bitter words at Wolsey's influence over the King:
This Priest has no pride in him?[16]
Suff.
Not to speake of:
I would not be so sicke though for his place:
But this cannot continue.
Norff.
If it doe,
Ile venture one; have at him.
Suff.
I another.
II.ii.81-84 (1126-31)
I draw certain conclusions from this study. Editors of modernized texts—influenced to follow tradition by the custom of marking up some previous text with their own alterations—have paid too little attention to the necessity to paraphrase every line of an Elizabethan dramatist (and particularly, Shakespeare). Paraphrasing requires scrupulous analysis of the sense as a means of observing its logic and true meaning. The servant of paraphrase and of meaning is accurate syntactical analysis, with especial reference to what elements in a sentence are the modifiers and what the modified. For example, paraphrase based on analysis of modification would reveal whether 'all in Gold' modifies 'Clinquant' or 'like Heathen Gods'; whether it was the hacking of the root or the mutilation of the rest of the tree, the root being left untouched, that allowed the air to dry up the sap; whether men do worst as often as best or whether their worst often hits a grosser quality than their best; whether Wolsey was fashioned to much honor, or fashioned to much honor from his cradle; whether Suffolk's 'I another' refers somehow to 'one' in the sense of for one, or whether 'I another' refers back to a compound noun 'have-at-him' preceded by the adjective 'one'. Some of the semi-substantives I have mentioned involved absolute meaning; others created delicate but nevertheless significant shades of meaning. Editors truly need to raise the level of their consciousness when dealing with Elizabethan dramatic punctuation whether they are producing unmodernized or modernized texts. There has been too much neglect of semi-substantive meaning in comparison to the care devoted to emending the words of a text.
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