The Variorum Antony and Cleopatra

SHAKESPEAREAN scholars have once more cause for rejoicing. In this volume Dr. Furness presents them with the fourteenth play in his admirable edition, equipped as before with the essence of the comment and criticism of two hundred years, with all the results of scholarship on date and sources, and with an account of the fortunes of the drama on the stage. For purposes of comparison Dryden’s treatment of the same story in his All for Love is printed in full, and a score of other dramatic versions are summarized with varying degrees of fullness. The quality of the compilation remains as noteworthy as its compendiousness. It is rare indeed to find either in the printing of the Folio text or in the abstracts of criticism any falling away from that accuracy which has from the first distinguished this great undertaking. The mere statement of these facts makes further praise unnecessary.

But Dr. Furness’s eagerness to serve Shakespeare does not stop here. He is no longer content merely to chronicle the opinions and conclusions of others. Every note dealing with a disputed point closes with the judgment — we had almost said the decision — of the editor, and in his preface he combats sturdily what he conceives to be widely current misinterpretations of some of the chief characters. The almost official standing which the weightiness of the edition seems to confer upon these utterances warrants us in considering them with great care; for an effort is necessary not to be overawed by the ipse dixit of one whose labors, so amply vouched for, point him out as umpire. He himself has often shown us how to be justly critical of the great Shakespeareans of the past without stinting admiration, and we would fain follow his example.

The first question is of the text. Dr. Furness is now the leader of the wholesome reaction against reckless emendation, —a reaction which itself tends towards an opposite extreme, that of a superstitious veneration for the authority of the First Folio. It comes to be a foregone conclusion that, where any defense in any degree rational can be made for a Folio reading, Dr. Furness will be found on the conservative side. Of the two extremes this is undoubtedly the safer; yet surely there is a more excellent way. A few examples will show whither the tendency leads. Few of the learned and ingenious Theobald’s emendations have been more universally accepted than that which reads in v, ii, 87, in Cleopatra’s eulogy of her dead lover, —

The First Folio, sole source of the text for this play, reads for “ autumn ” “ Anthony,” and to “ Anthony ” Dr. Furness clings. “ Theobald,” he says, “ asks, ‘ how an Anthony could grow the more by reaping ? ’ Would it not be equally pertinent to ask how an autumn could grow the more by reaping ? Reaping in the autumn is done when the grain is ripe, and grain thus reaped never grows again.” True, in nature, one may reply, because winter follows. But there was no winter in Antony’s bounty; therefore “ an autumn ’t was, That grew the more by reaping.”

Again, in II, v, 79, 80, Cleopatra says, according to the Folio, —

On which the editor remarks: “Is this interrogation mark absolutely wrong ? It has been discarded by every editor since the Third Folio. But may it not indicate Charmian’s hesitation and Cleopatra’s imperious questioning of her delay?” To these queries one may safely answer that in modern typography the interrogation mark is absolutely wrong. It is only necessary to read the passage aloud and remember that in the Folio the mark in question has to do double duty for interrogations and exclamations.

In a famous passage in II, ii, 52, the Folio reads, —

Rowe, the first editor, corrected “ you have ” to “ you’ve not,” and most, though not all, later editors have substantially followed him. Ingleby held to the Folio, interpreting “ ' you have [to]’, in the sense of obligation, you must” “ To me,” says Dr. Furness, the meaning seems to be, ‘ If you ’ll patch a quarrell, inasmuch as you must make the patch out of good whole material, you must not take this.’ I think Ingleby is entirely right in h’s interpretation.” But this is to lose the force of the antithesis between " patch ” and “ whole matter.” “ You have no solid ground for a quarrell ” says Anthony, “ and so must base it on fragments. This won’t serve even as a fragment.”

Opinions on these matters will always differ; but these instances, to which many could be added will suffice to show Dr Furness’s tendency as a critic of the text

Of more general interest are the controversies of the Preface. One of these is in a sense also textual, yet of some moment to all who care lor our older literature. In several previous volumes, and here once more, Dr. Furness states that many of the misprints in the early editions “ are due to the practice of reading the copy aloud to the compositor, — a practice which we now know obtained in early printing-offices.” Among the examples he quotes are these typical ones: For “ shall well gree together ” the first Folio reads, “ shall well greet together; ” for “ thou should’st tow me after,” “ thou should’st stowe me after;” for “ no more but e’en a Woman,” “no more but in a Woman.” Any compositor, and, I should have thought, any one with much experience of proof-reading, could assure him that precisely such mistakes still occur without the aid of any such copy-reader as he assumes. Recently I have come across such clear instances of mistakes of the ear, as the setting up of “ sight” for “site ” and “ right ” for “ rite,” though the compositor was using printed copy. Such examples merely show that a compositor is often influenced by his mental ear, so to speak, and is liable to confuse words which sound alike as well as words which look alike. Dr. Furness’s case, then, cannot be proved from internal evidence. But what about the assertion that we know that the practice of reading to the compositor existed ? No reference is given in the present volume, but in the Variorum editions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Much Ado about Nothing, where the same theory is upheld, a reference is given to T. L. De Vinne’s Invention of Printing (New York, 1876, p. 524), where it is stated that “ Conrad Zeltner, a learned printer of the 17th century, said . . . ‘ that it was customary to employ a reader to read aloud to the compositors, who set the types from dictation, not seeing the copy.’ ” But in Mr. DeVinne’s second edition (1878) he corrected this statement, on the authority of the French bibliographer, J. P. A. Madden, to the effect that “ Zeltner was not a printer, but a Protestant minister . . . the author of a curious book entitled The Gallery of Learned men who have excelled in the honorable Art of Typography, printed at Nuremberg in 1716.” This weakens so seriously the authority of Zeltner that it has been necessary to seek more solid evidence. The most elaborate argument on Dr. Furness’s side is that of Dr. Madden himself; but an examination of Dr. Madden’s examples from the sixteenth and sevententh centuries has shown that the “ anagnostes ” or “ lector ” whom he defines as a reader to the compositors was really a reader to the proof-corrector.¹ An investigation of some twenty-nine sixteenth-century engravings of printing-offices listed by Mr. Falconer Madan of the Bodleian confirms this conclusion, and makes it clear that the compositor followed with his own eyes the copy, which was fastened to a “ visorium ” or lay on the type-case.

It has seemed worth while to go into this matter in some detail, since the repetition of Zeltner’s mistake in volumes so justly regarded as authoritative as the Variorum gives it a wide currency.

The search for the sources whence Shakespeare gathered the material for his plots has engaged the industry of scholars these many years; and now, when these sources, in the case of all but three plays, can be pointed to with fair assurance, one not infrequently hears ungrateful epithets cast at the painstaking “source-hunter.” One cause of this ingratitude seems to be that there has been a tendency on the part of the scholars to stop short of their goal. They have too often rested satisfied with the discovery of the bare fact, have failed to go on to its application. For few results of research have placed so potent a weapon in the hands of criticism as those which enable us to observe, as Dr. Furness says in connection with North’s Plutarch, “ the magic whereby Shakespeare, gilding the pale stream with heavenly alchemy, transfigures the quiet prose, at times almost word for word, into exalted poetry.” And in matters of plot and characterization the insight and appreciation that may be gained are no less notable than in the matter of diction and poetry. In his Preface, however, Dr. Furness has chosen to lay stress on the other aspect of the case. The accuracy of our reading of the characters of Octavius Cæsar and Cleopatra has suffered seriously, he maintains, from the preconceptions carried over from our knowledge of history; and therefore “ we should accept these plays with our minds the proverbial tabula rasa,” “ we should accept Cleopatra, at Shakespeare’s hands, with minds unbiased by history. We should know no more of her than what we hear on the stage.”

Several considerations make us hesitate before assenting to this somewhat violent backward swing of the pendulum. Supposing for the moment that the view of Cæsar and of Cleopatra which Dr. Furness opposes to the current one is correct, it is doubtful whether the popular misconception can be laid to excessive study of Plutarch. Surely very many readers are familiar with Shakespeare’s play who never turned the pages of Sir Thomas North, popular though he has been in a restricted sense. Again, if, as Dr. Furness implies, our minds have been already biased in our schooldays, his counsel to wipe away every previous record is impossible, and the cure lies not in an attempt to forget, but in a more careful study of what Shakespeare has chosen to omit, to retain, and to add in his treatment of the material supplied by the great biographer of antiquity. Most doubtful of all, however, is his rereading of the two characters in question. He objects to the view of Octavius as “ cold, crafty, and self-seeking,” and gathers in rebuttal the scenes and utterances which indicate his nobility, his warm-heartedness, and his sincere and fervid love and admiration for Antony. Cleopatra has been unjustly regarded as fickle: “ her love for Anthony burned with the unflickering flame of wifely devotion.” Nor was Coleridge right in contrasting the love of affection and instinct of Romeo and Juliet with the love of passion and appetite of Antony and Cleopatra. Antony’s love for Cleopatra, says Dr. Furness. “ was not of the senses; for, be it remembered, Cleopatra was not beautiful; she had no physical allurements.”

Here, surely, is something to make us rub our eyes. The love of Antony and Cleopatra not of the senses! What, then, of the significance of the whole atmosphere of the Alexandrian court, reeking with sensual indulgence, the picturing of which is justly regarded as one of the most superb achievements of the dramatist ? Cleopatra had no physical allurements! What, then, of Enobarbus’s famous description of her when she pursed up Mark Antony’s heart upon the river of Cydnus ? There she is described as having o’er-pictured Venus, and elsewhere as “ a morsel for a monarch,” in whose lips and eyes was eternity, whose “ hand kings have lipp’d, and trembled kissing.”

But the answer to such extravagances is not best given by quoting opposing passages. For one quality is this tragedy even more notable than for that famous “ happy valiancy ” of style, — for the unparalleled success achieved in it by Shakespeare’s characteristic method of depicting human nature. In this field he is supreme largely because he gives to his creations a complexity that more than anything else makes them real. Smaller men create characters of a single dominating trait, or of a combination of a few easily harmonized traits; or, risking a greater failure, aim at complexity and achieve confusion and inconsistency. Shakespeare above all made men and women about whom we differ as we differ over the people we know; and our instinct is right in condemning the rival interpretation rather than believing that the artist has bungled. What Dr. Furness has done in this attempt to ennoble Octavius and whitewash Cleopatra is to select, under the obsession of an idea, one set of passages, all of which have their due significance, and from these to derive portraits of a man and a woman lacking precisely that subtlety and that delicate balancing of opposing tendencies which are essential elements of some of the most superb characterizations in all literature.

The critic’s laurels are not always to be awarded to the scholar.