William Shakespeare should have tried harder to preserve his plays. He should have secured his final manuscripts or something for future generations. I’ve always wanted to see the evidence of his drafting process; a scope of the syntax flows he imagined and then crossed out when he deemed them inadequate. Perhaps a journal? Cataloged snippets of his feelings when constructing these elaborate plots and romances. At the bare minimum, I’d accept anything resembling a “first edition” or “original copy” with his scribbled-out handwriting. Only then would we have a direct indication of his true intent as an author, or better yet, Will’s Will.
The admiration of his fame began for me in the fourth grade, when our elementary opera club adapted A Midsummer Night’s Dream during a showcase of our annual Shakespeare festival held in the cafeteria. My New York City arts-oriented school secured my preadolescent exposure to Will and his works because of how they would repeatedly appear throughout the future of our academic endeavors. They couldn’t have foreseen things more accurately, as Shakespeare traveled with me all the way to the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Shakespeare wrote thirty-eight plays, one hundred and fifty-four sonnets, and a variety of other poems and verses. His words left a lasting impression on the incomparables of the Elizabethan era and generated his immortal influence on the literature and theatre we know now. However, Shakespeare didn’t see to the preservation of his name; the actors from Shakespeare's company are the ones responsible for maintaining the contents of his plays and allowing his legacy to continue.
Seven years after Shakespeare died, thirty-six of his plays were printed in the First Folio, in 1623. The First Folio, “Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies,” is the first time where his plays are sorted into the genres they are renowned for today. There exist quartos that have defined categorizations and such, but his “Comedies, Histories & Tragedies” is what set the standards we abide by, regardless of the contrasts they may pose to the quartos. Time has affected the documentation of Shakespeare, and centuries of analyzing and reenacting his plays led to the inevitable quest for contextual definitions. Any standard audience reading 400-year-old English would feel unfamiliar with the language. It’s compelling that such major extensions can be found observing both recent works of Shakespeare and ancient copies: elaborated stage directions and scene breaks, even clarifications, by different editors over time. Do these embellishments modify Shakespeare in a large way and shadow his true author’s intent? Are they helping or hurting the authenticity and preservation of his work? I flipped through the Facsimile of Will’s First Folio in Special Collections for my collegiate English seminar and wondered, are we reading Shakespeare: Editors Edition more so than the legitimate words of Will?
One may ponder why this should matter to me, an 18-year-old with an essay to write and classes to attend. While that’s all true, it’s because of Shakespeare that I found my passion.
My childhood joys of acting began with that fourth-grade Shakespeare festival and, to my core, theater and performing framed everything about who I am today. I care about Will’s Will because, authentic or phony, plays written by Shakespeare impact all of the artistic world we live in. So many of the movies and pop-culture references acclaimed today can be traced back to the Mecca of storytelling and undisputable mastery of playwriting. Probably the most recognized of his works, and my personal favorite, is the tale of Romeo and Juliet.
A Brief Overview
Romeo and Juliet was written around the year 1591. The tragedy tells the infamous story of two young “star-crossed” lovers in Verona. The pair’s relentless and ridiculous affections for one another trumped all sense of family-based loyalties, as the anxieties that brewed from parental disapproval for the couple inspired them to take a suicidal turn for the worst. Who doesn’t love the “warring families to lovers” trope? This iconic story has been reprised in countless adaptations of the original play and reformed to fit a more modern depiction through films like West Side Story or Teen Beach Movie. Nevertheless, the relevance of the original has never faltered.
In Special Collections, I found two versions of Romeo and Juliet: Volume VI of The Works of Shakespear, published in 1771, and a Facsimile of Mr. William Shakespear’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies published in 1664. In the physical archive, my ratty, pocket-sized, softcover of Romeo and Juliet from a high-school rehearsal manifest, smeared with pen marks and flooded with definitions and scripted interpretations, appeared insignificant compared to this forearm-lengthed supreme book. Shakespeare in its cardinal form: preserved, grand, and free of bounds on how to read it.
What Makes Modern Editions Different?
Stage directions: the unspoken italics that indicate everything not directly told by the characters to the audience. Stage directions are how the playwright delivers their instructions on anything from how a set should look, to when a character is to enter or exit the stage. The Facsimile of the 1664 edition of Romeo and Juliet I observed in Special Collections introduced this idea that much of “Shakespeare’s intent” was hyperbolic as a result of new editions crafted year after year. The stage directions of Romeo and Juliet circa 1664 revealed nothing other than what needed to be contained: the bare minimum: (see exeunt right and enter Juliet.)
In addition to informing the actor of their internal objectives and actions in performance, stage directions give clues to the reader of the subtleties they missed during verbal exchanges between characters on the page. In interacting with and interpreting Elizabethan or Shakespearean English, many readers are deterred by the unfamiliar dialogue and rely on stage directions to grasp the plot. When opening this facsimile for the first time, I was beyond daunted by the emptiness of the segments that were stripped of the protective and informative bylines I remembered from high school.
That intimidation became a revelation after noticing that the marginalia printed into the versions I used (see below) were not the true written intention of William Shakespeare whatsoever. The Updated Edition of Folger Shakespeare Library’s Romeo and Juliet contained an augmented version of the original stage directions. The edict “Exeunt” was extended through time to “They exit, the Capulet men bearing off Tybalt’s body. Spoiler alert! I don’t think Will intended to make it that easy for readers to just extract the answers from the letters themself. Those stubborn and rigid pages were meant to be toiled with to bring meaning to the jargon—that’s why they were printed so thick in the first place. During rehearsals, teachers used to force us to cover those “damn encyclopedia pages” in our copies with Post-its so that we really worked to bring meaning to the dialogue. Shakespeare’s plays were always intended to be experienced as performance, and for an audience to have a genuine understanding of what the hell is happening, actors become fluent in ways to insert vocal inflections or physical indications. Like watching his plays, reading Shakespeare wasn’t meant to be simple at all, but it was surely meant to be your own. Will never released a dictionary, so we have to assume that he expected his audience to just figure it out for themselves. The left-handed page above shows an example of a newer volume with paginated translations and definitions.
Even though another Shakespearean volume I explored in Special Collections was also published a century later than the Folios, that essence of originality remained. No cost was spared in generating these Volumes; maintaining that sense of importance was executed through the prioritization of presentation and small aspects like graphics. The book opens up to be wider than my elbow to the tip of my middle finger. The thick ivory paper that chafes between your fingers as you transfer them to the next page felt priceless. That grandeur and importance resonated through the age of the object, years of history sewn into the binding that rattles all your senses. Many mass-market versions of Romeo and Juliet exclude the beautiful illustrations at scene changes, stylistically representative of the time it was written, and instead pull focus to the editor’s notes on the adjacent page. Nowhere when admiring this book circa 1771 did I long for the clarifications of lines, or embellished stage directions.
W.I.O.W: What is Our Will?
During my time in the Special Collections archives, examining numerous copies of Romeo and Juliet, I stopped searching for Will’s true intent and began admiring how remarkable it is that Shakespeare survives today. I recognized then that it is new editions and publications that nurture his legacy through the test of time. Immunity to oblivion is rare and goes to show how much Shakespeare matters. Opening the worlds of Shakespeare to new generations promotes the inclusivity that art and literature need to foster. My copy of Romeo and Juliet, stuffed with editorial clarifications and evolved stage directions, is not Shakespeare's original Romeo and Juliet, but the editors that reimagined Shakespeare and produced these new editions ensured the accurate congruence of the plot and the longevity of Shakespeare in my classroom and this developing society. I am grateful that Shakespeare lives on through people like me, and those who challenge what is said to be true. Tending to my unsolved mysteries has revealed to me the beauty of the unknown, and the gift that is an eternal search for more.
What Was Will’s Will could always be a question on my mind. We may never know his true intent, but there is one thing I am certain about. William Shakespeare would have loved the fact that he is still talked about today and would want to be talked about tomorrow.
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Funding for this series—which allowed HH to pay student writers and editors—was generously provided by the Friends of the UW-Madison Libraries. Special thanks are due, as well, to the staff of Special Collections, and especially to Lisa Wettleson, who guided students through the process of learning how to conduct original research in rare book and archival libraries.
About the author: Eva Yoshikawa is an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from New York City. She attended LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts and credits her love for theater to her mother. This was her first time writing for purposes outside of school or birthday cards. In college, Eva plans to study Economics and Political Science. In life, Eva eventually wishes to become a food critic. Her favorite things about Madison are the friends she’s met and the memories she has made. Her least favorite thing about Madison is the lack of New York Bagels.
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