Gabriel Egan

Attributing the Authorship of the Henry VI Plays by Word Adjacency

The project was a collaboration between the Centre for Textual Studies at De Montfort University and the Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

As it was, is, or will be played: title-pages and the theatre industry to 1610

Whereas modern actors usually start with a printed text of some form, we are used to the idea that early modern actors started with manuscripts and that printing followed performance. Confirming this, the title-pages of printed plays refer back to past performance with such phrases as ‘As it hath beene publikely acted by the right Honourable the Lorde Chamberlaine his Seruants’1 or ‘As it was acted by the Kings Maiesties seruants at the Globe’,2 to take examples from two first printings of Shakespeare plays. These locutions promise the reader that the contents will be ‘as’ the play was acted, that the text captures something of the pleasure of performance, although my second example, the phrasing on the title-page of the first printing of Troilus and Cressida, comes from a book that survives in two states (Qa and Qb). Qb has a reset title-page that removes the reference to performance but adds that the lovers’ ‘history’ is ‘Famous’.3 The necessity that this second state could not refer back to a performance — apparently because whoever printed it discovered that it had not been publicly performed — was made into virtue with an epistle that emphasizes the readerly benefits. At least, that is one way to read it. Alternatively, Gary Taylor’s conjecture is that the epistle was written in 1603 when the play was surreptitiously obtained by a printer after the Inns of Court premiere. The printing was blocked, or not attempted, and the play went on to be performed at the Globe. When it came to be printed in 1609, the printers assumed that it had been played at the Globe and wrote the title-page to Qa, but towards the end of the printing they found the epistle, believed it, and so they set a new title-page and added the epistle.4

Stylometric analysis of Early Modern period English plays

Function word adjacency networks (WANs) are used to study the authorship of plays from the Early Modern English period. In these networks, nodes are function words and directed edges between two nodes represent the relative frequency of directed co-appearance of the two words. For every analyzed play, a WAN is constructed and these are aggregated to generate author profile networks. We first study the similarity of writing styles between Early English playwrights by comparing the profile WANs. The accuracy of using WANs for authorship attribution is then demonstrated by attributing known plays among six popular playwrights. Moreover, the WAN method is shown to outperform other frequency-based methods on attributing Early English plays. In addition, WANs are shown to be reliable classifiers even when attributing collaborative plays. For several plays of disputed co-authorship, a deeper analysis is performed by attributing every act and scene separately, in which we both corroborate existing breakdowns and provide evidence of new assignments.

The book as object in Ray Galton and Alan Simpson's Hancock Half Hour episode 'The Missing Page'

ABSTRACT In their scripts for the television and radio shows of Hancocks Half Hour, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson formulaically employed prolepsis to enable rapid composition of an ironic twist for each episodes ending. For each denouement, a moment from earlier in the episode was revisited and amplified, sometimes explicitly, but more often because, one senses, the writers sought inspiration by looking over what they had already written to see if a suitable candidate moment could be reworked. By the beginning of the second radio series (April–July 1955), the expectation of an ending that recapitulated an antecedent moment was firmly established, and in the finest episodes, Galton and Simpson show an ironic self-consciousness about formulaic writing and the sense of an ending. The self-consciousness is most apparent in the celebrated television episode called ‘The Missing Page’.

Review of Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona directed by Simon Godwin for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 16 July 2014

In the early eighteenth century, Alexander Pope remarked that of Shakespeare’s plays The Two Gentlemen of Verona is “suppos’d to be one of the first he wrote” (155), but he omitted to say who thought this or why. In 1963, Stanley Wells published an influential article proposing that this was Shakespeare’s first attempt at writing a play, before he had quite learnt his craft, and that in its awkward moments mixed with flashes of brilliance we see Shakespeare feeling his way towards the sublimity that would come later. In an interview printed in this production’s programme, director Simon Godwin refers to one of the signs of dramatic immaturity that Wells spotted: “The scenes tend to be written for two people, sometimes three, frequently one. . . . [More experienced dramatists] expand their vision, they discover how to write for plural voices”. One upside to such limitations in this early Shakespeare writing, according to Godwin, is that “this play is joyfully clear” (Godwin “Staging Early Shakespeare”). The performance certainly was joyfully clear: for once, almost every line spoken in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre was completely audible and (notwithstanding Shakespeare’s occasionally crabbed expression) was intelligible, even when the actor’s back was turned to the auditor, as so often happens on this venue’s thrust stage surrounded on three sides by its audience. The only exception was Leigh Quinn, who played Julia’s maid Lucetta with a strong and painfully high-frequency Scottish accent (there is no necessary connection between these adjectives, as was shown by the gorgeous clarity of Maureen Beattie’s strongly Scottish Mistress Quickly in the RSC’s 2 Henry 4 in 2007– 2008). The setting was modern and the first scene located in a piazza on a hot Veronese afternoon as locals took drinks and ice cream for refreshment. In this production, Julia was apparently too poor to offer full-time employment to her maid, so Lucetta supplemented her wages by waitressing for Antonio’s ice cream parlour. She was still in her waitress’s uniform while Julia planned her expedition to follow Proteus to Milan, leaving Lucetta in charge: “All that is mine I leave at thy dispose, / My goods, my lands, my reputation” (2.7.86–87). This seemed rather a heavy responsibility for the waitress, although to be fair, Shakespeare himself seems to have forgotten to tuck in the loose end of just what kind of family and life Julia leaves behind in Verona. For this production, someone (presumably Godwin) decided that Thurio, “a foolish rival to Valentine” according to the Folio’s dramatis personae, is in fact named Turio and that is how it was pronounced and written in the programme.

Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia

vinced, for example, that they are the only defenders of true Christianity. Because their belief is so intense, the Old Believers have handled their confrontation with the officially sanctioned Orthodox Church with determination, rigidity, bitterness, and real fanaticism. This fractured movement is rooted in an ideology that even separates each community of Old Believers from the other groups. Disputes about personal grooming, dress, diet, and responses to modern technology are endemic to these communities. Since the Old Believers are convinced that they are the last defenders of authentic Christianity, they have concluded that the End of the World is imminent. They have tended to see, for example, Peter the Great’s reforms as well as those of the Soviet Union as the works of the Antichrist. For over two decades Crummey has studied aspects of Old Belief and has collected these essays plus two new ones into this volume. The Preface and Afterword are new as well. He critiques the Marxist and Freudian insights as legitimate models for studying history. He objects to the Marxist approach because it demands that scholars search for overt or hidden political and social messages in religious texts rather than examining the theological and liturgical aspects, to which the authors devoted themselves. Marxist historians would not be able to see that the thousands of pages devoted to the twofinger sign of the cross, for example, were significant. The Freudian approach stresses the notion that contemporary historians cannot immerse themselves in the religious world-views of the past and so should apply contemporary models to make their subjects comprehensible to their readers. Crummey tries to understand the views of his subjects on their own terms, that is, those that reflect their anxieties and hopes. He tries to contextualize Old Belief and to study it with an eye to the international debates about “popular religion.” These essays not only investigate a fascinating religious movement that expended a great deal of time and energy to opposing the political governments from the mid-seventeenth century to the present. They also explore the significant debates swirling around the religious and liturgical issues that concerned the Believers. Additionally, these essays point to the evolution of Crummey’s own intellectual odyssey. In his earlier essays, he stressed the radical separation of Old Believer culture from mainstream culture. In more recent essays, influenced by Russian scholars, he has become aware of the subtle ways in which the leaders of Old Belief remained in dialogue with official culture in order to advance their agenda. Crummey makes very effective use of the secondary literature and of the primary texts of the movement. He even uses the confession of an Altai peasant, found by N. N. Pokrovskii in the Tobol’sk archives. This discovery brings to the reader a glimpse of the inner life of a man who was an extraordinary representative of his time and cultural milieu. This peasant admitted to using prayers and incantations to God, the Blessed Virgin, and devils. He covered the entire spectrum. Here is a monograph that carefully explicates a religious movement and its relationship to modernity over the centuries as well as tracing the intellectual maturation of the author. The book also offers a superb review of the literature on the Old Believer movement and admirably serves as a model for other historians as they plunge into documents by suggesting that they should be open to critiquing their own scholarly agendas.

Shakespeare's Memory Theatre: Recollection, Properties, and Character. By Lina Perkins Wilder

Objects help people remember, and according to Lina Perkins Wilder Shakespeare’s theatrical practice invokes a range of objects—some present on the stage, some just talked about— that stimulate the characters and the audience to recall what has gone before. Wilder notices that mental processes are frequently figured as feminine, with the brain as a womb and wit as a feminine wandering of the mind. Gender features largely in this book (but not its title) because of this imagery and also because some women exist largely to do the necessary recollecting—such as the wailing wives and mothers in the Henry VI plays—and to stand for the dangerous uncontrollability of recollection. Lady Macbeth, for example, discovers that one cannot simply obliterate knowledge of one’s actions. Wilder gives a nuanced account of the ideas of Shakespeare’s contemporaries about just how memory works, and their schemes for improving its efficiency. Her readings of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the Histories, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and The Tempest are largely concerned with tragic loss because that is the use to which Shakespeare mostly put his ‘‘memory theatre.’’ The key moments of Romeo and Juliet for Wilder’s analysis are the Nurse’s account of Juliet’s weaning and Romeo’s recollection of the Apothecary’s shop full of memorably strange objects. These speeches show dilatio, the rhetorical trope of meandering loquaciousness that suspends the plot. Falstaff, on the other hand, is all inventio, the trope for remembering things one has come across in order to re-use them to make something new. Henry V, by contrast, looks forward, constructing the present as something to be recalled later with pride. Wilder observes that Hamlet’s role as chief remembrancer is rather effeminizing, but he compensates by recalling the classical Hecuba who not only remembered the lost Trojan men but avenged them. Wilder’s readings of Othello, Macbeth, and The Tempest are equally insightful about key moments of the plays, but necessarily partial: this approach cannot account for everything. There are weaknesses. Wilder takes no account of Macbeth being Thomas Middleton’s adaptation of a lost Shakespearian original, which affects her claims for the mnemonic function of the apparitions conjured by the witches. Robert Greene did not make ‘‘disparaging remarks about Shakespeare in Cuthbert cony-catcher’’ (193), but rather Henry Chettle did in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit (1592). Wilder assumes that the princes’ ghosts appearing before Hastings’s ghost in Q1 and Q2 Richard III is ‘‘a mistake’’ (12) corrected in Q3, since they ought to appear in the order they died. In fact, Q1–2’s order may well reflect streamlining for performance: by having the princes enter and exit before Hastings one of the boy actors can double as the ghost of Anne. Finally, Wilder makes a convincing argument that invention and recollection were frequently figured as feminine reproductive activities, yet curiously she omits perhaps the strongest piece of evidence for her case, Richard II’s remarkable soliloquy about peopling an imaginary world: ‘‘My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul/ . . . and these two beget/ A generation of still-breeding thoughts’’ (5.5.6–8).

Discoveries from archaeology: Dealing with the past in the present

This introduction places the contents of the special issue “Discoveries from Archaeology” in the context of philosophical approaches to questions of knowledge. As a method for generating new knowledge, archaeology has a special contribution to make to Shakespeare studies, most particularly in helping us to understand just what the commercial theatres of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century London looked like. As well as interpreting from the surviving foundations of these buildings their size and shape, archaeological examination of small artefacts apparently dropped at the theatres can help historians of material culture to illuminate the working practices of early moderns, inside and outside the theatre.

Margreta de Grazia Hamlet without Hamlet Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 277 p. £17.99. ISBN: 978-0-521-69036-2.

This is a book review. It was published in the journal, New theatre quarterly [© Cambridge University Press] and the definitive version is available at: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayIssue?jid=NTQ&volumeId=23&issueId=04&iid=1412512

Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel, ed. From Script to Stage in Early Modern England Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 264 p. £17.99. ISBN: 1-403-933443-x.

This is a book review. It was published in the journal, Theatre notebook (© Society for Theatre Research)it is also available electronically at: http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/searchFulltext.do?id=R03889510&divLevel=0&area=abell&forward=critref_ft