Thomas Dabbs talks with Tiffany Stern of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, about her recent perspectives on ballads in early modern drama, on Edmond Malone’s 18th-century scholarship, and on her editorial work in Shakespeare and 16th-century literature
Thomas Dabbs talks with Tiffany Stern of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, about her recent perspectives on ballads in early modern drama, on Edmond Malone’s 18th-century scholarship, and on her editorial work in Shakespeare and 16th-century literature
This is Speaking of Shakespeare conversations about things Shakespearean I'm Thomas Dabbs broadcasting Aoyama Gakuin University in central Tokyo if you are joining us on YouTube you should know that this program is also available on your favorite podcast platform this talk is with Tiffany Stern of the Shakespeare Institute University of Birmingham located in Stratford upon Avon Tiffany is deputy director of research at The Institute and also fellow of the British Academy we will talk about her recent perspectives on ballads in early modern drama on Edmund Malone's 18th century Shakespeare scholarship and on her recent editorial work in Shakespeare and in 16th century literature this talk is funded by the Aoyama Gakuin Information Media Center this series has been maintained with support from the Aoyama Gakuin Institute of the humanities and from the Japan Society for the promotion of science Tiffany thank you so much for joining us again thank you for inviting me I will tell our audience we started and I forgot to hit record this is something I have a little note on my computer reminding me but I was so excited to see you that I forgot to do it anyhow uh it was two years ago that two years and a couple of months ago that we've last talked and it seems like yesterday and I can't believe time has passed that quickly and at that time your book on rehearsals you were looking into rehearsing in Shakespeare's time I want I have some specific questions even about that book before we finish but what I want to do is move forward at that point you we talked about Fairgrounds and the relationship between Fairgrounds and players and all of this just rich exciting stuff that comes from the time of Shakespeare and the material elements and the social and uh the uh the time itself which is so exciting to me as a as a cultural historian and I know Shakespeare is also our contemporary in many in many ways but it's so good to see that I wanted to also move forward to your work on ballads we started that last time we're going to look at that in just a moment I wanted to feature your recent Cambridge element publication elements publication on Shakespeare and Malone in the 18th century and the problems of chronology but let's move on to ballad you have accused our esteemed playwright Shakespeare and Johnson of selling or promoting merch during their Productions and this article that you have recently published this fascinating article Ballance and product placement in the time of Shakespeare is where I'd like to start and may I ask you to give us a little bit of an overview of of ballads and product placement in the time of Shakespeare absolutely I'm just completing a book on this subject actually so I'm very thrilled to get the chance to talk about it um so I became really interested in these pieces of paper it's a single piece of paper printed on one side which has the words of a song printed on it and that's what a ballad was in the early modern period And I was interested that um when you read a play on a page maybe the play has lots of songs in it and they all sort of on the page look the same but some um of those songs on the page are actually songs to be circulated on those printed ballot sheets so I started thinking how how did these relate the uh the written play and the printed ballot sheet and as I explored more and more it became clear that sometimes plays were merchandising those ballots so I started by looking at that and then I realized oh it's not just that plays are merchandising ballads sometimes the playwrights are writing ballads to be merch IED and they're putting them in their play and then so I kind of they must be selling them around the playhouse how does this work and so I started researching how and where ballads were sold who did that and it became clear that playwright that playhouses had ballad singers and sellers you sing to sell around them entertaining the que the line as they came into the theater and then entertaining the que the line as they came out again and that keeps the people in the queue sort of makes makes them behave um but that means that the people queuing are hearing songs from the play in advance or songs from the play afterwards and that they're buying a song and that that's their momento from their trip to the theater um and that means that those particular songs songs that are also sold as ballads are merchandise and then I realized well of course in our theaters we for a long time time you know sold in the old days the CD of the of the music um you know we we often merchandise the music bit separately from the rest of the play and that's always kind of shrewd marketing because then you don't release the actual play but you release a little tempting bit of it which also then advertises the play to other people so um so anyway so I'm writing a book on ballads not songs but ballads specifically that are in plays that it seems are also being sold around plays and then just to add to that it also became clear that there are a lot of ballads that are about plays and that tell their story and that are kind of synopses or sort of abstracts and I started to realize those two are being sold in that same place so that we often think of the play as that bit of dialogue that happens inside the playhouse but suppose we expand and think of the songs that happen outside the playhouse and now we've got a bigger context for the play It's like a wider paratext that's a very Musical one and it means that our our plays are always framed by music before and afterwards and the music often has a strange connection to the play inside and there's another bit I should add that that at the end of plays even a play with no ballad at the end of plays it was usual for the clown to sing and dance a jig or sometimes a group of people but very often the clown and that jig was a ballot and it might be for sale um after the out of the playhouse so I started to realize that this thing is both to do with paratext and text but it's also kind of to do with the geography of a playhouse and when does the play begin and where does the playhouse stop and all those huge questions so I'm sorry that was a massive answer but that it's all in my head at present so that's what I'm thinking about well it's uh it's impossible for you to go on too too much about this because it's absolutely fascinating I remember uh first attending uh I don't even want to say the years now but uh RSC Productions and buying posters uh for those Productions and some of them were as I still have a couple of them uh they're absolutely lovely uh with the artist and so forth and I wanted our audience to know my students and uh others that these are uh broad sheets or broad size large pieces of paper printed on one side you can fold them up and put them in your pocket if you want to or you can put them on a wall you can decorate the pub walls with them and and uh they are uh collector's items and they have uh these beautiful inscriptions the well wood Cuts I'm sorry wood Cuts uh a lot of little things going on from the example that you uh picked up from that German collection there's uh in in Munich uh there were you were receiving permissions uh and I'm wondering how they how those uh how they got over there uh but uh yes well actually I mean for that uh that's a book which is also available here in our collections um and I wanted the free version so I wanted the one that that that done open comment so so that's what's going on there but um uh this is a book um which has songs in it and it's and it's published it's repeatedly published in the in the 1640s and the 1650s and it's got songs in it and it's got song specific pictures in it um and it came to I I was actually very inspired by an article by called JP Cuts uh I think writing in the 50s who wrote so brilliantly on music in Shakespeare and he suggested um uh and and I think he is definitely right that these songs with pictures are are ballads the the songs are ballads that were sold on Broad sheets um the pictures were made for those broad sheets and the broad sheets have not survived which is very usual for these were very ephemeral texts um but but his suggestion is that the shattered bits of broad sheet the picture and the actual words have ended up um uh in this book Recreation for ingenious headpieces and I think he also helped me to think of different ways of looking for ballads so you you can only really write on ballads if you have a gathered field and one reason why ballad study is quite modern quite recent is that only recently have two brilliant websites come about that gather enough of them for you really to have a look at broadsheets collectively um and one is by the bodan it's the bodan libraries ballad uh broadsheet collection and the other is called EBA which is English broadside ballad archive I think ebba and having these enabled me to see um so many ballads that were published and often survive in strange collections not the general public ones but but but often in scrapbooks and other places but then with the help of cups I realized that there were more ballads to be found shattered but now inside books and then there are more which are preserved in manuscript although they were printed the print is lost but sometimes people noted them down so it's actually it's pretty tricky Gathering Together the information you need when you do you start to realize oh there's a lot of connection with plays and not only with plays because ballads were like kind of magazine articles and you would have a a ballad that's on someone being hanged and and you'd have a ballad on on a flood and you'd have a ballad um on advice if you want to get married and you'd have a ballad that's pornographic and you had sort of everything was covered in ballads but there's a subset that's kind of play ballads and are being Mar marketed in particular ways and that's what really excited me yeah there's a space for irreverence in these that's allowed whereas something a speech that is said might not be might not make it through the audit uh and uh you know the bodess or the playfulness and so forth of course and you think in modern movies how important music is and how soundtracks have been sold and individual songs are songs we still sing you know from Zephyr Elli Romeo and Juliet my my goodness you know so many immediate examples of this and you show though how Johnson uh takes this song about the cut purse warning uh you know sort of mama don't let your babies grow up to be Cowboys right warning people against becoming cut purses being sung and sold by a guy who's distracting the crowd so his friend can uh pickpocket the uh audience and then making fun of this uh having you know in a Johnsonian way uh uh you taking the piss out of out of these people on stage and yet promoting The Ballad that might there might be some authorship in there so uh you know the this the irony stacked on irony the irony St on irony because if if you come out of Johnson's play and buy The Ballad that has been promoted by that play sneakily kind of your own pocket has been a bit picked or you've come out poor yourself so you are the dupe and I think that's quite johnsonian and I was intrigued by how many by by how often Johnson was was writing ballads even in mosques which are such Elite Productions we think of them as sort of one-off elite special Court Productions but he writes a bit that that gets published and I suspect it gets published by him because he loves seeing himself in print um he writes a bit that gets published that gets marketed and that makes sense if you're going to write a whole mask it must be very annoying to think that it only has one outing of of course you're going to want to see one bit uh uh get a bit more popularity and maybe make a bit more cash yeah well I think it may have been you that I was talking with about this I've done so many of these now but the the gap between what we consider the elite class and common or the citizens and whatnot is not that big when we look at Johnson and Shakespeare these plays we know were perfectly transferable to the public stage to the uh Court to the court uh and probably uh not much well not much has changed because they had to be approved so uh and you you do see that some jokes are probably received differently perhaps by one group than by the other but they work both ways uh and you you made mention in your Malone book about the 18th century conception of Genius but that is genius uh when you have a work that can make uh it's in Midsummer Night Dream uh you pointed to Shakespeare's uh well I I liked what you did with the Willow Willow uh song in the desona song uh and the the gender in that you know the uh it would to know that to be part inside uh to know what's going on that would be such a poignant moment and it is in production modern production but it's so much more uh if that tune is part of your life and part of your conscious Consciousness uh and it brings so much more meaning to to see this uh I was thinking about Jeep's daughter when I I was reading because I had such a hard time teaching it uh you know because let's face it this is not I I don't know what uh preachers or what Parables they used in church but it wasn't part you know I was a Protestant guy who grew up jeffa is just not one of these people you know we we get the Samson we get the David we get the Moses and of course Jesus whatnot jeffa is not somebody we get to but there's that ballad right yeah and yeah so so if if I may um yes so there were an awful lot of stories that sometimes when we need footnotes on them and we think they're obscure there are awful lot of stories that everyone knew including all the illiterate because they were in famous ballads yeah and ballads very often tell classical stories and ballads very often tell Bible stories yeah and um and one of those ballads is the ballad of Jeff's daughter and how he um sacrifices his virgin daughter in order to win Victory and that's essentially what the ballad is about and various snatches of it are sung in Hamlet and for us it's something that needs explanation and footnote and then you're kind of oh why why is this being said to ponus now of course for an audience who already know the ballad who recognize the tune and the words and already know oh it's a story about a man who sacrificed his daughter and then there's ponus and this is for them it's foreshadowing they're kind of oh no oh ailia oh dear oh yeah you know so so that's and this is a different use of ballad which we also see a lot in plays and that's the ballad which is a well-known ballad not by the author necessarily but quoted or referred to in the play and and um appealing to your shared understanding of that b B's story and that Ballard's tune so that so that all the audience is sort of haunted and there with those references and as I say for us those are obscure but it makes us realize that the audience had a different body of knowledge from ours and that the ballad body of knowledge was one of the most profound ones they had because you hear them sung you don't have to be literate to know any ballad story and you yourself can sing join in the chorus without being literate and given that all your pubs will be covered in ballads and your house even if you're a literate is likely to be decorated with ballads because of the pictures and in fact people would even learn to read uh by working through the ballads on their own walls they they'd learn to spell out things because they know what the song is so plays that use ballads are appealing to this vast shared body of popular information and also that kind of the popular warmth you know when when we go when we hear a pop song we all know and that puts us all in the same position and ballads served exactly that purpose yes well and so many things popped to mind but uh I do remember going to a production a few years back at the globe at the Modern globe and there was a class in there a teacher had brought uh had reserved space I think they were they were Groundlings and uh when the line came not all that Glitters Is gold right everyone chimed in so it's sort of that Dynamic where the audience is right there with you I can see Hamlet Hamming it up I wrote down the lines for one Fair daughter and no more for which he loved passing well right and whatever the tune was because we we're not quite sure that they'll say sung to the tune of that you point out or sung to if we have that tune we might know but I also think too that this these are moments and I've seen it done in uh a couple of brandall Productions these are moments where the person whoever is doing the music for your production can go in and make up a melody and uh you know cry no more ladies cry no more you can uh participate that way there's an interaction between the modern stage and the Old Stage so maybe not knowing the melody is helpful uh in that the directors the you know the musical directions and so forth can interact with SH that way all right and with the audience yeah yes absolutely I I think it makes a difference though if the audience do know the tune because then they hear it in their head and maybe even you know I I wondered about things like The desona Willow Song like ailia songs will the audience in any way feel tempted to join in you know you feel as though that would instinctively be wrong but would it now they are inside the words of that person being that person it's a deep emotional attachment and if they don't sing but just join in in their heads that still gives them a shared moment with that character that they maybe don't have with other characters and I'm sort of interested how often these shared songs for instance are are sung by the women you know I I think this this this makes you identify in slightly different ways um yeah yeah and no absolutely um yeah I can think of popular uh I'm thinking of Oasis actually the the rock band where they were so popular at one point that you um uh one of the brothers would just start singing the song and the audience would take it and he would just hold the you know the microphone out there and let them do it you know uh it's a shame that that we there's a lot we don't have and that's a shame but the fact that you have found these elements uh in the drama we can bring it back and I think it helps and I wanted to make mention of this in introducing you and overlooked it it helps modern uh theater producers you've worked with the uh with several troops on acting and uh acting without Direction uh old pronunciation uh in I think that was the black frers in Stanton Virginia uh that group uh so you're you're in the world with this and uh people are producing plays and doing these sorts of things uh see opportunities here to to bring the audience into uh the production uh because otherwise how could you make it through what act two scene two what is traditionally scene two of act two in Hamlet that enormous scene that has all of those referential things you know from you know child's companies children's companies to coinage to here and there oh yes things are more lost than others or need more explanation than others but I certainly think you know I would be Keen to work with companies on kind of how they can think about the music not not necessarily using the music from then though it's surprising how much of it survives but maybe using modern equivalents that that have the same level of recognizability oh so there is a surviving there's a good bit of we know some of these tunes right yes yeah we know quite a lot of the tunes because what's strange about these ballads is that um you get lots and lots of those big broad sheets with the pictures they name the tune the words but actually um there are many fewer Tunes they name than there are ballads so um because so very often you'd buy new words to a tune you already know um so for instance there was a very famous tune the most famous which was called Fortune my foe and originally it was on a ballad called Fortune my foe which is kind of oh no why is the world against me and that tune was so famous that when people were going to be hanged for being traitors a ballad would be written in their voice saying I did this terrible thing and it's right and correct that I'm being hanged and I'm really sorry and it would always be to the tune of Fortune my foe so that became known as the hanging tune but what is interesting is we have a ballad of Titus andronicus telling the story of Shakespeare's play in the voice of Titus and it is to the tune of Fortune my foe so now we've got the Titus story but it also sounds like a bad luck story and it also sounds a bit like a traitor getting his just deserts which is an interesting take on the Titus and jonus story so ballads are so layered and the tunes are themselves layered but because the tunes are not new new Tunes generally they are old recognizable Tunes the words are new and but the tune is old and that's why you could buy a ballad and sing it even if um you could sing it at once you wouldn't necessarily have to learn it um you don't need your loot and ballad Tunes tend to be and and I say this as someone I really wish I was a good singer and I'm not nearly as good as I would like to be and sometimes if I'm giving a tour I really want to sing a ballad and I just about can do it because they have a small vocal range you know they're for real people they're not for oppressing us you know that's what I'm thinking um yeah because this is done this is done by uh Protestant churches and uh they would bring in in some cases these kind of body songs that use the melody for him of course the famous example of that is uh is uh gustoff Holtz the planets from uh Jupiter right the uh the uh Church of England him the
famous you know just breaking out from this kind of uh sort of postmodern Melody into this uh hymn uh beautiful work but yes the appropriation there of the melodies for uh various purposes I like it better when it ends up in the theater than in the church because some sometimes the uh the lyrics are a little bit uh uh dry and not very inspiring but I won't to go into that too much uh well let's let's think of coming back to this I don't want to miss out on the Cambridge elements text here with Malone now this is uh this is the stuff that uh we'll talk about your editing work but when you're in this world I to to come across someone like Edmund Malone I did in my early studies on Marlo because he he put together the first edition of Marlo's work he he found the parts and put Marlo together again and uh you know we can debate and argue about what belonged where and who were wrote what but he was the one who did it and there was a copy uh in the Malone room in the bodland library that I got to visit that had the privilege of visiting years ago uh and Malone's always been close to my heart because of the um effort that he made we think of the professionalization of scholarship maybe 100 years later but he was doing work that was a it was real work it was something you have to take seriously and he W his big job uh was to uh for George Stevens right uh to to try to to do do a chronology of the plays using external and internal evidence and it's it's difficult stuff he didn't have access to the things we now have access to uh and then the benefits of all of these Scholars who have you know spent hours just tirelessly working for references but he did pretty darn well uh from what I see his third uh and he changed and he wasn't a jerk about it you know he didn't insist on his and no one else's you know you have those people out there yeah yes so Edmond Malone was an extraordinary and deeply brilliant man who was an 18th century scholar who was inventing a lot of the disciplines that that we now work in so he kind of invented Theater history and he invented Shakespeare's chronology and he was trained as a lawyer so he used his kind of forensic lawyers mind and he gathered rare documents and he sort of categorized them and put put put them in order and as you say he also did this for Marlo and and so he's a brilliant brilliant man and he was given the task actually to write a life of Shakespeare and he realized there isn't a ton of exciting information it's not that easy to write a life of Shakespeare so he thought why don't I take Shakespeare's plays and put them in chronological order see the the first one written the second one written the third one written why didn't I create that order because we didn't know and don't know the chronological order of the place and he thought if I come up with a chronological order of the plays that will also kind of give me Shakespeare's life because I'll see what are the first things he wrote the middle things the last things and because he was 18th century I will see how his genius uh progressed I'll see how he became a genius and I'll work my way and so he came up with the chronology and then because he's a very good scholar he rethought it came up with a better one as he got more information and then he came up with a third one which was published posthumously um and those chronologies I he's often troduced you know he's often treated poorly by Scholars who look at his first chronology and go oh look how laughably wrong this is but his third chronology is very similar to our own um and so he more or less created our chronology and he also you have it here I if you can see it but in the book let me get the camera right here uh and I I just was hypnotized by this and I was looking at the third one I'm going okay I I don't have this in my head but this looks pretty accurate from you know well it depends whether it's accurate I mean that would depend on whether our chronology now is accurate yeah and that's the point yeah my argument in the book is the brilliant Malone created roughly our chronology and we've roughly stuck to it but I was also saying is are his methods actually right I think some don't work together and what I ended up concluding and it's one of those annoying books you know like it it would be really great if I could conclude going so here's the actual chronology I've solved it but no what I conclude is Malone's not as right as we thought and we are not as right as we thought and our chronology is more open to question than we'd thought but I can't tell you the solution very familiar with the closing uh of your book and this this is it's just the truth TI Tiffany it's just the truth the number of times we have all been foiled when we're trying to write on Shakespeare and we want to date the play uh you you you would love to have a performance of Midsummer Night's Dream on record in front of Queen Elizabeth I don't think we have one I think it's much later to make the argument that you know the flexibility and we wish that the the office of the rebels had been you know those records had been as exact as they were in the 90s uh as they were before the 90s the 1590s when Shakespeare was active but um uh yeah we don't there's a lot we just don't don't know there's a lot we don't know and I think where we get muddled is every now and then um so there's one thing which is dating the work like when did Shakespeare write 12th night and we've got reason to think there's there's a kind of that there's a 1602 performance so so we know that it exists by then but then we've got a text of 12th night there's only one it's in the folio of 1623 and so when does that text date is a different question from when did Shakespeare first write 12th night and we tend to bang those two together so we tend to go 12th night is 1602 and this text is 1602 but if you look at the text of 12th KN it has all kinds of Hall marks of being quite a late Shakespeare play which is what Malone originally thought um uh and and its Hallmark you know it's it's got a lot of song which is associated usually with black fries Theater which the company went to after 1608 and N so and and and and so I think things that we are muddled about and don't realize are that we that we have muddled together the texts we have and a text now lost that Shakespeare wrote at one point of time but also um when you actually ask the chronological question I think Malone was asking the wrong question and we are because the question when did Shakespeare write this play is not an answerable question because you don't write a play in a day and the problem with the question when did Shakespeare write this play is do we mean when did he take an empty piece of paper and pick up a quill and write d or do we mean when he wrote fin at the end which could be that that same month but in principle could be five years later you know he could have written and revised and rethought um and uh and in between written another play and so forth so so and in fact if his simultaneously writing two play you know so there are all kinds of questions that are wrong there are all kinds of things that are wrong with the question when did Shakespeare write this play particularly and if he revised the play well is that the date then when he finally finished you know so when did he start when did he finish and a much better question is in which order were these plays first performed because although it's no easier to answer it is a real question there will be an order whereas the order in which he wrote the play it's not a clear question it's not clear what that means um and as I say it's very usual for a Shakespeare play to have definite early signs in it and definite later signs in it showing that that play has been rethought Often by him uh and sometimes by other people and and it has a really sliding date of what it is uh it does and you can see uh differences between quto versions and folio versions um I've seen two or three or four places right off the top of my head where I'm thinking you know the reason that isn't there is because it was no longer topical uh the the character of uh fillit or fillrate in Midsummer Night's Dream is in the earlier quto but I think that was a joke on tilney and that joke had vanished 20 years later you know so it makes sense and who Among Us uh when we are trying to publish a little article right uh when we get these uh corrected you you get you get edited and then you get edited and sometimes the editors come back and say listen this you you got to stop right I think F Scott fitzgeral was uh absolutely uh he he would get the galys at a time when the galys were not digitized at all and he would start rewriting to GS you know and the publisher would just yank the book from them uh authorship is never over you know and I've never talk to the author of any anything any who said Okay that was perfect that was precisely what I wanted wanted to say you always look back right so you put this into the area of dramatic performance where a laugh pops up one night and you go you know we can push this over here we need to take that out that joke wasn't funny right they're they're testing material in front of real audiences so of course it is it's a process uh and we're saying that we have a main that shakespear is the writer of all of this the main guy but there's a lot of stuff being uh collaborated uh around these text and these uh this you know great dramatic poetry yeah yeah there's a lot of collaboration there and I think we've got it quite obsessed with authorial collaboration what other authors wrote with Shakespeare but I actually also suspect that of being sometimes the wrong question because a lot of Shakespeare texts where they really change with between CTO and and folio for instance a lot of lot of the changes are very specifically around musical bits uh songs come and some songs go The Willow Song is in one version of aell but not in the other you know um uh a lot of disturbances around music and I came to think that a lot of the revision is you give the text to the music person who after Shakespeare was John Wilson um and and John Wilson does revisions around music because he's revamping the music and I think in the folio uh you can see quite a lot of John Wilson revisions which because we've never asked has a composer done the revisions so we've never answered you know you answer the questions you ask so if you say which other playwright made these revisions then you search for other playwrights and then you come up with other playwrights but if you change the question you get a different answer so I think something else I was floating in that book was whether in terms of chronology um we've also sometimes maybe been asking the wrong questions and you can't get the right answer if your question is wrong um and uh I you know I don't want to push that too far I I don't want to get into um fights with the authorship people because they're really mean but um but across the board you know yes but with respect uh you know I think sometimes the the that the the wrong questions have been pursued yeah I I spoke with the student not long ago undergrad who wanted to write a a thesis we have a senior or fourthe thesis and she wanted to go into Shakespeare's view of uh women and I said we we were all through a bad start here you know authorial intention and it took about 20 minutes for me to explain that but the uh the thing is I always just get kind of reactive to this whole notion of authorial intention uh particularly in Shakespeare and any dramatist you know uh a modern dramatist you know was David mammo is he a capitalist or is he socialist can we tell from Glenn Gary Glenn Ross what he is it's these are questions that are not necessary for us now and I'm not sure if we're that interested in exactly when uh Charles Dickens sat down to write something and he's a perfectly famous writer Ernest Hemingway or any anyone uh but it seems to be an obsession in Shakespeare and it might be the pity of the biography you know the the lack of which everybody uh there gaps in in everybody's life you know really unless you the queen I guess you know but you know somebody that was deemed important uh this this is moving is segueing in very nicely into editing and I kind of want to uh use an a Tiffany Stern image here of the weaving uh so I we're free to to move fluidly here but on all of these topics but you're very very involved in projects that could could uh what's the old could find uh find a person mad or leave them
so in in terms of textual editing because that involves the collation of very many well of all additions and so forth you're doing this work for U Norton and you're doing this work for um you're doing the ardan and uh I wanted to uh yeah the Arden really is the the first one you wanted to talk about and uh let's bring us up the date a bit on what's going on over over there okay so with Peter Holland and Zachary lesser the three of us are General editors yeah of Arden Shakespeare the fourth iteration so there's been ardin one Arden two ardin three now uh we are General editing Arden four but we have different individual editors for each of our volumes and we're at the exciting exciting moment now where um some texts have been completed and they're just being sent in and we're having the delight and thrill and and fear and everything else of of going through those and and checking through those so that I think we're hoping that Arden 4 will be launched NE next year with any luck we we don't want to launch with one volume we want to La launch with maybe three or four so but that seems in sight um and this will be a rethinking of Shakespeare again uh in the ardan formula which as you'll probably know is is quite scholarly quite footnote but there are a couple of things we're going to do that uh um one is we're thinking very much we're asking editors to think about the concerns of now and so to edit um you know to edit wisely and robustly and thoughtfully but you know issues of race Meo issues these these are very current and our additions and our notes must think through those things in in ways that haven't been thought through before so for instance there's a word casually used in Shakespeare a lot Fair meaning beautiful but of course Fair also assumes a form of beauty that is blond so you know know we just we don't want people to go overboard but it's it's important to bear in mind certain subtexts that we haven't really thought about before so these These are going to be additions thinking through issues of now as well as new issues of then uh thinking through new uh new ways of editing that have kind of emerged over the past um few years but also um I I think the we're also going to uh publish a kind of big full ardens and then um online it will be possible uh to have an Arden with glosses and more simple notes so if if you don't want the big full thing you can have a um a a briefer version so which might be more teachable depending so so we're having uh so we're having a kind of double Arden uh also so okay so the online version would have fewer notes or no notes at all no it would have all the notes but you would be able to flick and go I just really want glosses or you know so that if so that the idea is if you want the full art and experience it is there yeah but uh I think what is the case is if if you look at an Arden sometimes you've got two lines of text and all the rest is note and that that that is brilliant for one kind of person and for another kind of person it's a bit offputting so we want you to be able to toggle through those experiences also online we're going to Arin was going to have a stronger digital it will be kind of born digital but also simultaneously in print but it will digitally you know it does mean that every now and then you can gloss a word with a picture rather than with words you can gloss a sound with the sound the trouble is you can't print that out so we're still working out the sort of to and fro between digital and print you know there was a world in which we were going to be fully digital but that was a world that didn't come into being um uh we we had thought that maybe the future would be a a digital one and people wouldn't be so a physical book focused students wouldn't be but thank goodness they are they still like Shakespeare in books so we will to put Shakespeare in books yeah the death the death of the book has been greatly exaggerated yes indeed my students uh still feel comfortable uh of course expensive books are another thing but the uh the thing is I I believe it's two years ago you yes I was speaking with you and you're talking about you don't need to construct a museum around these uh text and I thought a lot about that after speaking with you and I'm thinking you know if you need to find out something about the year 1601 February and whatnot it's all online you know you can get uh a lot of this information uh meanings of words and so forth are already there you know so have that and yet you do want something to be accompany to accompany the text to be to be part of that and I think that this sounds like a perfect approach uh that you can have both and why not you know yes and I don't mind two lines with the annotations because uh I like the annotate I like it on the same page I don't like looking back into back and trying to figure out which number there's so many yeah no that's really important having it on the page um and the other thing I I will say as a general editor is what's very good about still having the page because we weren't sure at one stage whether we would but yeah because we are definitely editing for the page what's good is that actually forces a limit on the length of a note because a note cannot be longer than a page you know there has to be some Shakespeare text and you know and some editors are brilliantly precise and some editors are brilliantly prolix okay so and you know so it's helpful having these these things that that circumscribe what people do well you have all of these people out there and I could be one of them but I'm I'm not but I mean I could be uh because I've looked at these notes in several additions aren additions and I thought I thought H that's going on a little bit longer you know than and then I've also thought wait a second now I'm going to have to look up this or that because I'm not quite sure if this is accurate or whatnot and you have these people who can come in afterwards and be critical of one thing or another thing which have would be the cause of some anxiety and so anybody's out there listening just try it yourself and see if you can do a perfect decision that will satisfy everyone um I I just I've for years loved the ardan's approach uh as a teacher uh and uh boy that I like their approach that over the pandemic uh the they they kept things moving uh and just amazing to me yeah I mean if I may say another thing about art and which I think which will make them different maybe from other series um is that uh quite often a series and it sort of relates back to the Malone thing quite often a series comes up with a moment that you're to edit too so in the old days people would often say edit in order to create the manuscript that Shakespeare gave to the company before it was soiled with performance and then from the kind of 80s onwards people have been saying edit to the first performance um uh now all of these are sort of these are just mental constructs but we and Arden are saying work out what do you think the text or texts is is what what moments do you think there's do you think you've got a prompt book do you think you've got an author's text do you think you've got a later revision what do you think that text is decision one and now what do you want to edit to decision two and you can edit to any moment uh that's early modern so do you want to edit to a public theater performance that the GL or do you want to edit to um the boxing day performance at court um so we're asking the editors both to work out what their texts are and what they're going to edit them to that will help them shape the notes and that will also mean that Arden does not have quite the uniformity of another uh of another complete works but instead each Edition is really really owned by its editor and its editor will have picked the moment for that text and again you know we cannot be accurate you you know I I'm editing the Tempest um and I'm editing it to um uh to the wedding performances at court for the Palatine wedding um and I I cannot accurately do that I can't know but we can't accurately edit to any moment but at least having a focus both gives us things to think about and for me it allows me to Think Through other things that went on at the wedding and how they might have interacted with the Tempest colors that that that that were being worn at the wedding and and so forth and I think um every I I hope this means that every editor has particular ownership of their text um and and also I hope that will be teachable reminding people that that that that the texts you know were performed at moments in time and they will have been different according to the different moment and and allowing that to shape the editor's thought yeah yeah that's a brilliant approach but ah H Hamet Hamlet is a bear Hamlet is just so there's so much I rival texts for it so yes yeah and there's so much I want from the uh second quto that is not in the folio you know I like um Horatio's earlier speech uh uh and was speaking of uh prom promoting other things you know the references to Julius Caesar in there which are pretty famous now among editors but uh the you know uh you can just see a Revival coming or something of that nature uh or or an inside joke you know that the ponus played Caesar actually did Play Ces or whatnot yes there are two explanations for the references for Julius Caesar in in in the qu2 and one is that Shakespeare is writing both the plays Hamlet and Julius Caesar at the same time and there's kind of bleed through but another is indeed and I sort of favor this now I'm I'm I'm more conscious of H just how thoughtful the theater was about marketing is that Shakespeare is in one play advertising another play did you like this play with ghosts because there are ghosts also at Julia Caesar and then maybe that's why that gets removed uh in the folio text because they're no longer in performance back to back and so you know that maybe one has rotated out um so you know so I yes I certainly am interested in those things yeah you wonder too how uh the source deex plutar um might have there might be more distance between the English translations I haven't cross referenced that and looked at that that might be some but yeah uh is Julius Caesar is no longer attached to uh hamlet in the same way in 1623 and uh uh Midsummer Night stream isn't attached to Romeo and Juliet through the pyramis and thisby story uh and you know it's it's not quite the same is it you know there there things that you would automatically if you were editing a text uh after the playwright's death right and you had the freedom to do that nobody's gonna stop you and I've I believe Mr Fletcher is out there and a younger uh and he's quite capable uh but also there are others you know there actors who are deeply involved in the production but there and I see a broader Community uh forming around this this production and uh and I'd like to think in complete Earnest let's do the best you know basically the same as your group at the Arden let's do the best possible job you know the this this is this is a a river and the water flows you know but we have to pick a place in time here to do this thing uh brilliant uh well is there any other are there any other additions that you uh you mentioned Norton uh Norton is a different thing it's it's uh uh I've been doing an um uh this is with Steven greenblat and I've been redoing the 16th century literature anthology so um and and that has been tricky in all sorts of different ways because they're all already is a brilliant 16th century Anthology but um anthologies like additions represent their times and you know this Anthology uh that exists uh is quite courtly and quite male lots of petan verse and I think it was felt that they wanted some other voices in there as well but actually in the 16th century it's it's not that easy to find a ton of say women's voices but I found some more women's voices um some voices of trade um uh got a gravestone in there I just tried to get other things in there so that we could hear what was happening as well as the gentleman writing courtly poetry and so it's uh it's a slightly frenetic volume now it and and and um I hope it works you know it's hard it's hard to know but it um uh we ended up putting in a commonplace book and of course an early modern commonplace book you'd come up with themes like like you know anger and bardy and Love and You you'd write you'd put po poems or Pros under those themes and so I I came up with some themes that just got some issues that weren't otherwise dealt with in the volume and put poems or bits of Pros that would match some of those into the commonplace book and I hope that's just given a slightly different feel to the volume but but we shall see that that also I think should be out next year oh that's wonderful yeah just to clarify the ardan editorial work is on the plays of Shakespeare Shakespeare yes Norton work Norton is on 16th century literature 16th century literature and we know in our schooling we remember the names of various anthologies I love anthologies uh now some people have criticized them you know that we we don't go to an individual writer and you know discover that writer on their own turf but as a portal as an opening is a way to browse it's they just they mean so much and thinking back in my educational training they give you a feeling at least that you have some g grip on the uh on the time and place and the literature the literary Styles and so forth yes and an anthology is like a carefully curated portal indeed so it's uh um and it's just a great starting place it's not the ending Place yeah but it it it gives you a chosen selection that makes logical sense that is glossed and noted so that to help you understand it so it's it's just a brilliant exciting way to to to work out which bits you interest you and then if you want to follow through you can you can take a specific author or specific theme and run with it yourself but it has been introduced to you by the Anthology and and you know anthologies are themselves interesting because the Norton is quite big and quite heavy and you know you've got to think about do students want to it would be hard to carry more than one of those around to you know maybe students don't want to carry them in the same way so you're kind of can we make it a bit shorter so that it's slightly lighter you know but all these are kind of you know it's it's interesting the the the questions the things one ends up discussing about anthologies which is different from discussions about the complete works of Shakespeare but anyway yes but but that's that's another thing I've been doing and and I guess the other big thing I've been thinking about because of this anniversary is I've been thinking about first folio and um are there let's talk about the first folio and because you are you have a we've had several uh first folio people in uh this year this uh anniversary anniversary year yeah there's a lot of great work and there's a lot to talk about and you take a position on the first folio that is unique so uh let's let's roll with that yeah um well I'll tell you um lots of shakespeareans for this year were asked to come up with a folio talk of course you know and maybe there were tiny territory battles and so I was kind of I I don't want to be in any of those battles let let me what what hasn't been looked at before you know what can I and I was really inspired by Malone George Stevens the 18th century Scholars because they had looked carefully and with kind of fresh different eyes and I was sort of inspired by them and and they looked not with reverence but they were kind of error spotting and I suppose a little bit I got error spotting from them and so the things I came to be interested in about the folio are um I was kind of okay uh the preliminary matter the way the the folio starts the picture of Shakespeare um the interspersed preliminary met in a very odd order that's a different odd order depending on folio um for commendatory poems and a catalog and a list of actors but they're weirdly interspersed not in a logical order and I was looking at sort of I I was looking at that and and amongst my questions were why is Shakespeare's picture so awful and uh why are there so few commendatory poems and why are they in a strange order and I started to realize the preliminary matter has gone quite wrong and I think there's a practical reason for this and and it's that that you know the printing house it took over a year to print the folio and all the time you're printing that money isn't coming in you're not going to get money for from it until uh you can sell it so they stop every now and then to print some other things just to keep going but but basically they're getting poorer and and poorer and more and more frantic and they need that book out and um the bit we read first the preliminary matter it's the bit that's printed very near the end after you've done the rest of the page the plays um with the exception of one play that came in late but um I think that preliminary matter is at a moment when they're really low on money they get a terrible Apprentice who doesn't know how to draw yet to do Shakespeare's picture they they get only two preliminary poems you can tell from the page order and then they Scrabble around to get two more they've only got four four poems saying Shakespeare's good and only Ben Johnson of those poets even clearly knew him yeah so so actually and you know I think all this year people have been talking about the great reverence for the book and the wonderful book and of course it's it's spectacular it's how we have 18 plays of Shakespeare that we wouldn't otherwise have but being tremendous is not the same as being good and this is a a book that starts really haphazardly and badly and and in ways that that an early modern reader would have seen like what why is why is why does the picture not have a picture frame why is the why why does the folio start with a poem by Ben Johnson rather than start with Shakespeare you know how come um and you know I think this is a poem that's meant to be under the picture and for various reasons had to be shifted so so for me it's been interesting to think about problems in the folio not in a spirit of meanness but just trying to work out have we admired this book too much to see what's there anymore and what happens if we look yeah yeah point point taken uh and they're so valuable now that probably they're probably people in the um in the in the world of Commerce who wouldn't want to hear uh much about this uh but I me value and worth you know yeah uh the the monument uh there there's just a lot of things well you know that there's a lot of evidence really when you see that the bodan sort of weren't really interested in it and didn't acquire it until later uh wanted a later folio you know which I guess what they did was they they had a first folio but when they got a second folio they they were kind of okay we've got the better one now so we get rid of the first one get rid of the first that's oh no but you know to us we're sort of oh my God and then they had to buy it back years later um at a much higher price at a much higher price but um but for then the logic of then you you know the the improved rep print with fewer typos is going to be better than than the earlier ER one you know they didn't know we were going to treat that book like a holy Relic it was a book you know its contents were important but the book wasn't and and that's you know now we treat it like a religious icon but and I think that is fascinating also yeah well it it it did what it did and important thing you and I and people watching here are the better for it you we are we are indeed a playright with half the plays probably wouldn't wouldn't it' had to be Shakespeare and somebody else uh maybe several other people which is another point and I think you have spoken to this too that you're in with Shakespeare I know that you your focus and your editing and so forth but this this is a Shakespeare in the world in 16th and late 16th early 17th century London but also in a community of writers of playwrights uh and sometimes vicious uh very competitive um and uh yes they're they're working a commercial Enterprise and so forth and the the the image of Shakespeare and folio is part of this does tend to draw you know put this big Shadow even on the 16th century literature that we afor mentioned uh and it's good for us to peek around and look at all of the other things going on here yeah oh oh yes yes um yeah the the the person we've back created onto Shakespeare is is very post 18th century and uh and I I I I do love I'm very fascinated in then I'm I'm really fascinated in how plays were performed and how they put on and how they were printed and who they were marketed to and who did the Performing and who did the printing and where did Shakespeare write and who did he hang out with and and I think sometimes um we forget to ask the questions of then because we've got a very confirmed Shakespeare in our mind who's a kind of he's a Shakespeare of somewhere between Romanticism and now yeah and Shakes Spirit of school yes and that's that's LED Shakespeare down some um muddy paths you know in people's minds and having probably more to do with the teacher and the system they were in than with the playright I I I do remember thinking oh my goodness Shakespeare there's no way you know I'm 16 17 years old there's just no way uh this is going to be too much for me um and uh we got the uhh Kent cursing oswal okay okay okay I get it uh there's some good stuff in here uh so uh you know we all get get through our own ways uh you you have spent your entire uh career though uh you were first at Oxford then at Cambridge and then back uh you made your way back to Oxford and then now you're at the Shakespeare Institute and uh in Stratford where you live yeah and so uh that uh is just a wonderful Journey there uh and the whole time with Shakespeare uh I'm in Japan and I'm I have have been and I will am continuing to write on Shakespeare you know how do you solve this enormous linguistic problem that you have uh the gaps uh between languages the uh and particularly East Asian languages and uh Shakespeare I'm spoken with soyo Kawai of University of Tokyo and he says it can be done and I've seen his work and I think he's right and um so uh uh you're you're very local uh dealing with this enormous Global figure uh and you're in you're you're in so many different areas I don't know where you find the time I just don't [Music]
know well I think it's uh the current job um which is a the Shakespeare Institute is a graduate school of the University of Birmingham but located in Stratford and I think it's helpful and wonderful that I have brilliant students and they are all working in the area I'm also working in so it's a very inspirational and and I have wonderful colleagues as well so it's it's inspirational to work at the Shakespeare Institute and that helps you know that's always putting new ideas my way and um and you fabulous students my way so I think that that that has helped and that has maybe given me lots of different lines different ways into Shakespeare and you know it was wonderful teaching at Oxford uh um uh and being a professor there um when you were at Oxford you teach 16th to 18th century and you teach as a generalist and I think that gave a that gave me uh the most brilliant grounding and again I had spectacular students but possibly as I myself became more and more focused it was quite nice to get a job where everyone was also focused on the Renaissance you know I think I am I am lucky in my job yeah and there there's the occasional performance in town and the RSU performances of course yes um and and there's always the hope the the dream you know I I live on on the welcome Hills um near where Shakespeare o owned sheep and I suppose I'm always hoping that oh I wonder if he did he stroll through my garden you know it's it's nice for me to dream this yeah probably so it's not that big it's not that big yes probably so uh I have a couple of stories I won't relate well I'll relate one I I remember there's there used to be uh we were at a BNB we were watching the we stayed out was uh in my schooling my undergraduate schooling and we got to do a bit at the University of London uh and and then study in Stratford for a month and get to see the entire uh Repertory and uh including uh a young Patrick Stewart a younger Patrick Stewart and uh Jonathan price and Glenda Jackson you know their names I could go on and on there was just these brilliant names but I was out for a walk and there was this I kept seeing this sign to snitterfield and I thought I you know I want to go to snitterfield I just sounds like and I walked down this path and it just disappeared and all of a sudden these large sheep are looking at me just standing there looking at me and I'm like I'm saying well what are you guys looking at and uh am I on the right path or I'm lost and I turned around and there was this farmer and he was carrying a shotgun and I said oh sir I suppose that you're wondering why an American is out here talking to your sheep I think I'll just go back home he said that's fine he was very friendly but I just those those stories of uh Stratford now why am I talking about this it seems to me that when we uh when we are trying to relate to Shakespeare and we have all of this 18th and 19th the Victorian the glossing over the icon and the bardolatry and so forth that we we tend to forget that he's he's from this small town and wandered around and had those same experiences maybe I walked down the same path as Shakespeare did maybe he had a conversation with the Sheep too you know why are you looking at me like that you guys going to charge me or what so umh just wonderful Tiffany uh let's see is there anything else uh I I think we've covered everything the key ones for the key the key things I still have another time I'd like to talk to you about Talton the clown but not now I'm going to turn to him next you come you can come on anytime you want to you are you are always welcome and uh I just get excited I usually I get kind of nervous but with guests that I've met before uh not nervous and with Tiffany Stern I feel that our interest overlaps so much that it's just going to be a joy and it was a joy to talk with you I'll let you uh this is your morning my afternoon and uh I'm a little bit late for supper but uh uh not it's all pre-planned
we but um uh what I'd like to do is ask you to stay for a moment after we finish recording and uh chat for just a moment and debrief a bit but I wanted to thank you uh on my behalf but also on behalf of all the members of our audience you have a lot of followers out there from our prior talk and I'm sure even more this time around and uh and you can come back any anytime when is you let me know and I I'll keep an eye out and invite you and I hope we can keep this thing going for for a while now so we can I hope I hope so it's it's it's a marvelous thing yeah so and thank you thank you for setting it up yeah I kind of wish well it it happened it happened when it happened but it would have been wonderful when we were younger to have all this technology uh to have been doing this because I think it's a good way to introduce uh people to the world and you know sometime sometimes it works to help diffuse some of these uh these uh sectarian battles that kind of pop up and remind us that we're all part of the same Community you know and and we have to stick together there are plenty of outside outside forces after us we don't need to be after each other yes it's I have a moment in the Malone book where I say roughly that that kind of um uh let's not we're trying to protect Humanities let's not tear one another apart but you weirdly weirdly I I I I I did say as a woman that kind of you know there there are particular male groups that are quite aggressive um uh subgroups within the editing world and kind of let's all be nice to one another and two two male reviewers of the book told me to take that bit out so I sort of oh dear I did not of course there's some other stories out there involving male female um and uh yeah I I know I know the types uh I remember them well uh and yes not but let's not end on this note let let's no let's not end on this note because there's so many people out there who have done such fine work and we're we're talking about uh people who are are brilliant like you uh who could have done other things you know you could have uh followed other paths and uh taken whatever uh academic achievements that you've done and whatnot and and we decided to do this and the road was not always smooth and well paved it's a it's a rough road no matter where you are and uh but we're we're so happy that you could join us here my Japanese colleagues are going to be thrilled but we have an international audience and everybody's welcome uh to to come in and participate so uh thank you so much and I hope we can talk we can talk with you again soon I I would love that thank you so much and thank you for inviting me