- Who's that?

- No one. The author.

Shakespeare in Love

Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries

William Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, London: Printed by Isaac Jaggard and Ed. Blount, 1623.

The joke from the popular film is obvious enough, though it always gets a laugh. The film's invented investor, Fennyman, asks about a person that he has noticed standing on stage, and Henslowe replies that he is "No one," just "the author." What is funny, of course, is not merely that Henslowe thinks of the author as "no one," but that the particular "no one" that Fennyman has pointed to is Shakespeare, who more than any person of that era, has become unmistakably someone--and someone precisely because he has preeminently become The Author. Shakespeare was, not surprisingly, "the man of the millennium" in many polls as the zeros of the year 2000 rolled into view. The familiar image of a man with a receding hairline and shiny forehead, a ruff around his neck, and a quill pen in hand serves not only to identify Shakespeare "the author" but increasingly has become an emblem of human creativity itself.

But the film's joke also speaks an often overlooked truth. Within the collaborative economies of the early modern theatre an author--even Shakespeare--was, if not exactly "no one," hardly the cynosure of the cultural world, hardly even "the author," as we have come to know that role, of his plays. It was an actors' theatre: Richard Burbage and Edward Alleyn were the celebrities of the age, rather than Shakespeare and Marlowe. Playwrighting was a kind of piece-work, providing the scripts for an emerging entertainment industry, scripts that legally belonged to the theatre companies and which were inevitably subjected to the contingencies of performance. Even Shakespeare, a sharer in the company for which he wrote during most of his career, would have had his plays altered as they remained in the repertory--cut, revised, modified for specific playing locations and occasions--alterations that may or may not have originated with him or have even received his approval. Certainly as the plays stayed in the repertory after his retirement from the company around 1612 and death in 1616, hands other than his own determined what was played.

Shakespeare's lack of interest in publishing his plays is tacit acknowledgement of the performative aspect of drama, if not also of the inescapable collaborations of its realization. Perhaps reluctant to claim an authority over them that he did not have by seeing them into print, Shakespeare contented himself with their availability in the theatre. Their plasticity there may well have seemed to him truer to their nature than the fixity they would achieve on the printed page.

Certainly in the theatre, in the various forms in which they have been played, they have had a long and successful run. But if Shakespeare cared little about their publication, it should not be forgotten that their theatrical longevity has been in part enabled because the plays did reach print. Although arguably Shakespeare does not "live" on the page quite as vitally as he does in the theater, at very least we must grant that in print he is preserved. It is not an entirely happy metaphor, I admit. Living beings are preferable to mummies, and print, in any case, does not preserve language as firmly as formaldehyde preserves bodies. Nonetheless, without print there is no Shakespeare for all time. It is in the printing house that his scattered "limbs" are collected and cured, as Heminge and Gondell say, re-membered as a body of work.

Such re-membering is of course no more exact than any other act of memory. Psychologists know that memory is never a perfect witness to the event remembered; it represses, displaces, and falsifies; nonetheless it is informative, though less as an objective representation of the event than as the overdetermined register of the event's reception and assimilation. Print remembers similarly; it too falsifies even as it recalls and records, incorporating elements separate from that which it would overtly remember. The Shakespeare remembered in the printing house is inevitably something other than Shakespeare--both more and less than his originary presence. His corpus is reconstructed by sets of motivations and practices that leave their marks upon the text, distorting it even as they preserve and set it forth.

	Thinking Point
	Can we ever consider the text of a play to be the ‘true’ unmediated form?

This is not to return to the notion of an ideal text independent of the processes of its materialization; it is to recognize that the text, like the past, is never available in unmediated form. This mediation is precisely what marks it as text, exactly as that which marks the past as past is the impossibility of an unmediated engagement with it. We, of course, engage Shakespeare only in mediated form. One could say that this means that we never actually engage Shakespeare, but to the degree that this is true it is merely an uninteresting literalism. Shakespeare is available precisely because "Shakespeare," in any meaningful sense other than the biographical, is--and has always been--a synecdoche for the involved mediations of the playhouse and printing house through which he is produced.

The printed plays that preserve Shakespeare for us are all in various ways deficient, yet, precisely in their distance from the ideal text of editorial desire (and, as that desire projects it, authorial intention), they witness to the complex conditions of authorship that shaped his theatrical career. Shakespeare has become virtually the iconic name for authorship itself, but he wrote in circumstances in which his individual achievement was inevitably dispersed into--if not compromised by--the collaborations necessary for both play and book production. Nonetheless, Shakespeare's apparent indifference to the publication of his plays, his manifest lack of interest in reasserting his authority over them, suggests how little he had invested in the notions of individuated authorship that, ironically, his name has come so triumphantly to represent. Literally his investment was elsewhere: in the lucrative partnership of the acting company. He worked comfortably within its necessary collaborations, and clearly felt no need to claim his play texts as his own as they began to circulate in print and be read.