Is this a buried nuance I see before me ...?

[Dave Monroe]

>From The Sunday Times
April 15, 2007

Is this a buried nuance I see before me...?

Jonathan Bate, editor of a new complete works of Shakespeare, explains
how computers have revealed the true meaning of celebrated phrases

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune: everyone knows the
phrase. And most people know where it's from: "To be, or not to be:
that is the question: / Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer /
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune / Or to take arms against
a sea of troubles . . ."

What does it actually mean? Something about being buffeted by bad luck
and worldly troubles, obviously. But the image is curious. Fortune,
who dishes out our luck, is traditionally personified as a woman. If
she has arrows, shouldn't she have a bow rather than a sling? Why
didn't Shakespeare write: "The bow and arrow of outrageous fortune"?
Or for that matter, "The slings and stones of outrageous fortune"?

Shakespearian commentators have puzzled over this conundrum for
centuries, even going so far as to suggest that the inconsistency of
weapon may mean that "slings" is a printer's error for "stings". Now,
however, we have a solution. Almost every book written in the age of
Shakespeare has been made available in digitised form. So you can go
to an amazing website from the University of Toronto called Lexicons
of Early Modern English and type in the word "sling". Within a second
the search engine will have worked its way through more than 150
dictionaries, glossaries and word lists from the 16th and 17th
centuries.

Up pops a citation from Randle Cotgrave's A Dictionary of the French
and English Tongues (1611), the first English-French dictionary:
"Mangonneau: An old-fashioned sling, or engine, whereout stones, old
iron, and great arrows were violently darted."

So arrows can be fired from a sling. Fortune doesn't have a puny
little hand sling — rather she is firing off a huge catapult, a mighty
engine of siege warfare. Hamlet's image in this line is as strong as
that in the next, where the hero imagines battling against an entire
sea of troubles.

In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff is repeatedly tricked into
being caught in the house of Mistress Ford when her sexually
possessive husband comes home. The first time he is bundled out in a
basket of dirty linen, the second he escapes in the disguise of "the
fat woman of Brentford".

Brentford (spelt Brainford in Shakespeare's time) was then still a
village on the road from London to Windsor. But why did Shakespeare
choose to give the place a name-check? Type it into an online database
of every surviving play from his time and you discover that Brentford
was a favourite location for sexual assignations. A modern equivalent
would be a reference to "round the back of King's Cross".

These are just two examples of how we are still making new discoveries
about Shakespeare's amazingly inventive language. Traditionally
editors have glossed his more obscure words by taking a definition
from the Oxford English Dictionary. But in many cases the Oxford
English Dictionary has come up with its definition by simply looking
at the example in Shakespeare. The new online databases allow us to
break out of this loop. They show us that many words purportedly
coined by Shakespeare were actually in wider currency at the time, but
they also make new revelations about the associative power of his
imagination.

"Do we really need another new edition of Shakespeare?" people ask me
when I tell them that, together with my team of associates, I've
devoted nearly 20 years to the preparation of the new RSC Shakespeare:
Complete Works. The new possibilities for exploring his language are
one reason why we most certainly do.

Another is the astonishing fact that no edition in the past three
centuries has consistently adopted the text of the most authoritative
original version of Shakespeare's plays: the 1623 First Folio (so
named for the large size and single fold of its paper) prepared by his
fellow actors John Hemings and Philip Condell. How on earth has this
state of affairs come about?

The scholarly editing of Shakespeare began in the 18th century, when
the model for such activity was the treatment of the classic literary
and historical texts of ancient Greece and Rome. The procedure was to
establish which surviving manuscript was the oldest, the aim being to
get as close as possible to the lost original, weeding out the errors
of transcription that had been introduced by successive scribes in the
centuries before the advent of print. As Shakespeare began to be
treated like a classic, the same procedure was applied to his texts.

About half of Shakespeare's plays appeared in print in his lifetime in
quarto format, cheap little books analogous to the modern paperback.
Following the classical principle that the earliest surviving text
must be the one closest to the original authorial manuscript,
generations of editors preferred the quarto texts to the posthumously
produced folio — save in a small number of cases where the quarto text
was so full of errors and inconsistencies that they had to rely on the
folio.

For this reason, all edited texts of the complete works published in
the past three centuries have been hybrids of quarto and folio,
scholarly reconstructions that merge together different moments in the
original life of many of the plays.

If you look at printers' handbooks from the age of Shakespeare, you
quickly discover that one of the first rules was that, whenever
possible, compositors were recommended to set their type from existing
printed books rather than manuscripts.

This was the age before mechanical typesetting, where each individual
letter had to be picked out by hand from the compositor's case and
placed on a stick (upside down and back to front) before being laid on
the press. Printers' lives were a lot easier when they were reprinting
existing books rather than struggling with handwritten copy.

Easily the quickest way to have created the First Folio would have
been simply to reprint those 18 plays that had already appeared in
quarto and only work from manuscript on the other 18. But that is not
what happened. Whenever quartos were used, playhouse "prompt books"
were also consulted and stage directions copied in from them. And in
the case of several major plays where a well-printed quarto was
available (notably Hamlet, Othello, Richard III and Troilus and
Cressida), the folio printers were instructed to work from an
alternative, playhouse-derived manuscript.

This meant that the whole process of producing the first complete
Shakespeare took months, even years, longer than it might have done.
Hemings and Condell wanted "the great variety of readers" to work from
texts that were close to the theatre life for which Shakespeare
originally intended them.

The Shakespeare First Folio is one of the iconic books in the cultural
tradition of the West — indeed, given Shakespeare's unprecedented
international reach, of the world — but such is the conservatism of
scholarly tradition that it has taken three centuries for it to be
properly edited as a book in its own right and for the practice of
mixing quarto and folio copy texts to be challenged.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article1654445.ece