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W. W. Greg as Literary Critic Author(s): Laurie Maguire Source: Textual Cultures, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2009), pp. 76-87 Published by: Indiana University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/tex.2009.4.2.76 Accessed: 24-05-2018 15:35 UTC

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W. W. Greg as Literary Critic

Laurie Maguire

Abstract

W. W. Greg made three forays into interpretive literary criticism with articles on Dr. Faus- tus, Hamlet, and King Lear. This essay assesses the contexts for these articles and consid- ers Greg’s limitations as a literary critic (limitations which are in part linked to his strengths as a bibliographer).

We r emember Gr eg as a bibliogr apher, but during his long textual career he also wrote three interpretive articles about drama. All three are seminal. In 1917 Greg published “Hamlet’s Hallucination”, which argued that the ghost in Act One, scene five was a figment of Hamlet’s “heat-op- pressed brain”. This was the article that, famously, John Dover Wilson read on the train to Sunderland and which gave him the epiphany that “I was born to answer it”, as he explains in the preface to that response, published eighteen years later, What Happens in Hamlet.1 It was over twenty years before Greg returned to literary criticism when in the 1940s he published two simi- larly bold articles in quick succession. “Time, Place and Politics in King Lear” (1940) tried to map and time the various journeys of the characters in Lear: for instance, Lear finds Kent in the stocks, having set out from Albany’s the previous afternoon and ridden via Cornwall’s; the company, Greg calculates, has “journeyed comparatively slowly [. . .] or perhaps they baited (at Corn- wall’s?) on the way” (GreG 1940, 435). “The Damnation of Faustus” (1946) argued that Faustus is granted his wish to be a spirit and is therefore irrevers- ibly damned. Introductions to editions still engage with these articles today.

1. See Wilson 1935, 7. In the preface to the book, an open letter to Greg, Dover Wilson explains how, in addition to his job in education, he contributed to the war effort by working for the Ministry of Munitions. Sent at an hour’s notice to Sunderland, he scooped up his mail to read during the long journey. The mail included “a square envelope containing the latest issue of The Modern Language Review” (p. 4). Wilson describes the “fun” and “excitement” of pursuing the ques- tion with which Greg “first sent [him] mad” (1935, 23).

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Laurie Maguire: W. W. Greg as Literary Critic | 77

I want here to focus on Greg’s attitude to Hamlet to see what it can tell us not about textual problems but about the play.

* * *

Hamlet is a play of doubles and duplication. It begins with an appearance which is a re-appearance: the Ghost has “twice before, and iust [Q1: iump] at this dead houre” appeared to Barnardo and Marcellus (TLN 81; 1.1.65).2 The Ghost’s narrative is a recounting of a past event; the play-within-the-play is a re-enactment of the Ghost’s story3 and is itself preceded by a dumb show that anticipates the plot. Claudius sends “two messages, and later two messengers, to explore what he knows” (sibony 1977, 67). Hamlet attempts to kill Clau- dius twice, once with a poisoned rapier and once with a poisoned drink. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are inseparable. Hamlet arranges for the play- ers to perform something like the murder of his father and then delivers his own soliloquy in which he formulates the plan as if for the first time. Even the enveloping action is characterised by repetition. Two visitors from be- yond the grave (the Ghost and Yorick’s skull) stimulate Hamlet’s memory at the beginning and end of the play; the spectators in Act Five assume the “pale and trembling” appearance of Horatio in Act One; Horatio at the end is schooled in past events as Hamlet had been in Act One.4 There are three Hamlets—father, son, and play-text—and there are two characters called Fortinbras: the one who dies when Hamlet is born, and the one who arrives when Hamlet dies. The play itself is a duplicate: a revision of (Kyd’s?) Hamlet. The entire action of the play is thus a series of repetitions, a “re-vision, a look- ing backwards”, while trying to go forward (see HaWkes 1985, 313).

Greg was uncomfortable with Hamlet’s hermeneutical and textual doubles. His anxiety focused on the anticipatory (and therefore unnecessary) dumb

2. References to the 1603 First Quarto, the 1604–1605 Second Quarto, and the 1623 First Folio will be indicated with the standard forms, respectively: Q1, Q2, and F. For a brief review of the reception of these early editions, see Davis 2006, 60–62. All cita- tions of Shakespeare’s plays are taken from the First Folio (Hinman 1968), following the convention of through-line numbering (TLN) and the conventional act, scene, and lines from the Riverside edition (evans 1964). Quotations from Q2 indicate first the quire’s signature and pagination and then the location in allen and muir 1981.

3. Thus “the middle of the play also represents the beginning of the story” (alexanDer 1971, 44).

4. For discussion of these repetitions, and of others, see: HaWkes 1985; HelGerson 1977; levenson 1981; PecHter 1987; PollarD 1989.

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78 | Textual Cultures 4.2 (2009)

show, which involves Claudius in contradictory behavior. Why, Greg won- dered, should Claudius react so strongly to the representation of his crime in the play-within-the-play when this action has already been presented in dumb show? In “Hamlet’s Hallucination” (1917), Greg set out to reconcile such con- tradictions and to establish certainty.

“I should like an authoritative statement of what Shakespeare thought about ghosts”, he began; “I feel that if one wishes to discuss an author’s treat- ment of any particular matter, one should take into consideration his gen- eral attitude towards the subject” (1917, 393). This is the New Bibliographical approach to interpretation, the search for a coherent system, and it leads Greg to suspect that since the ghosts in Richard 3, Julius Caesar, and Mac- beth are creations of the imagination, so too is the ghost in Hamlet. Thus for Greg, as for St Jerome, the author is defined as a “field of conceptual coher- ence” (Foucault 1979, 151).

Coherent authors do not write dumb shows that anticipate the action of the ensuing play. Sixteenth-century dumb shows took “many forms” and were “put to many uses”, Greg acknowledges, “[b]ut the mere duplication of the action of the play was not among these forms” (1917, 399). Ignoring the fact that this duplication comes at the heart of a play filled with duplication, and unable to edit it away (“there is no getting rid of it”, he says with evident disconsolation [398]), Greg presents us with the binary alternatives which characterize New Bibliographical method: to assume that Claudius’s claim is prompted by recognition of his crime “is to involve the plot in a hopeless contradiction”; therefore “[w]e have to choose between giving up Shake- speare as a rational playwright, and giving up our inherited beliefs regarding the story of Hamlet” (1917, 398 and 400). Greg’s alternatives are clearly rhe- torical. He has no intention of giving up Shakespeare as a rational play- wright, and so our inherited beliefs about Hamlet have to go.

Those inherited beliefs decree that Claudius loses his nerve when he sees his crime enacted and so disrupts the play-within-the-play. The existence of the dumb show, to which Claudius fails to react, makes this view untenable for Greg. He therefore recasts events as follows. The dumb show is an unexpected and unwelcome addition from Hamlet’s point of view because it forewarns Claudius. Hamlet thus has to change tactics: instead of waiting for Claudius to “blench”, he tries to provoke him with antagonistic and pointed speech. It is this incivility to which Claudius reacts by interrupting the play; in the follow- ing scene Claudius’s only anxiety concerns Hamlet’s sanity, not his own pub- lic disgrace following the revelation of his crime. The “only hypothesis consistent with the King’s behaviour is that in the dumb-show he actually fails to recognize the representation of his own crime”, writes Greg (1917, 401),

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Laurie Maguire: W. W. Greg as Literary Critic | 79

satisfied by his establishment of certainty: “This inference appears to be as certain as anything in criticism can be” (401), and later, “[t]his is really the only legitimate interpretation of the text” (406).

But what of the Ghost’s testimony? Greg anticipates this objection: “If the facts of King Hamlet’s death were not as represented in the players’ play, then the Ghost was no honest ghost, but a liar. In other words, the Ghost’s story was not a revelation, but a mere figment of Hamlet’s brain” (401; Greg’s emphasis). Leaving aside the specious logic of this statement (dishonest sto- ries, even from ghosts, need not be hallucinations), we may proceed to the evidence of Act 1, which Greg dispatches swiftly.

Greg dismisses Horatio’s testimony that the Ghost resembles old King Hamlet “when he the ambitious Norway combated”. After all, he reminds us, Horatio was, at most, a baby when this event occurred; besides, does he not tell us later that he only saw King Hamlet once? What grounds can Horatio possibly have for certainty in identifying the Ghost?5 Horatio is “a simple, honest, and healthy, but not a critical soul”6 and “[h]e is overwhelmed by the unexpectedness of his experience” (408). In short, “Horatio here is not giving [. . .] evidence of value, but indulging in mere imaginative rhetoric” (as, one is tempted to add, is Greg [408]). Horatio, nonetheless, predisposes Hamlet to the idea that the Ghost resembles his father, just as Marcellus, Francisco, and Barnardo had predisposed Horatio. The identification of the Ghost as King Hamlet is no more than “a freak of collective suggestion” (410).

The way is now clear for Greg to dispose of the next contradiction, the Ghost’s speech to Hamlet. The anomaly here—as Greg sees it—is that the language of the Ghost does not differ stylistically from that of Hamlet in the same scene. Both are “rhetorical rant. But why, in the name of common sense, should the Ghost, if genuine, think it necessary to talk in the same style?” (412). Greg’s “common sense” therefore dictates that the dialogue with the ghost is a figment of Hamlet’s imagination.7 We are given a qualifying caveat: Hamlet in his right mind could not be capable of envisaging a talking Ghost. But in his present grief-stricken state, thoughts of prison houses and murder and torment (remnants of Hamlet’s medieval childhood, we are told) are per- fectly logical.

5. In What Happens in Hamlet Dover Wilson ([1935] 1970) answers this question: Horatio must have been familiar with Claudius’s countenance from coins of the realm.

6. Cf. braDley 1904, 112: “Horatio, though entirely worthy of his [Hamlet’s] friend- ship is [. . .] intellectually not remarkable”.

7. Greg’s article fluctuates on this point. Sometimes it is the Ghost’s speech that is presented as an hallucination; sometimes it is the Ghost himself.

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80 | Textual Cultures 4.2 (2009)

This logic leads Greg to clear the final hurdle, the unlikely coincidence that a repertory play should replicate minutely the details of the senior Hamlet’s murder: “[a] very remarkable murder it was”, caused by a “drug un- known to science, medieval or modern” (412). Even here we see the search for coherence: the author is seen as a “historical figure at the cross-roads of a certain number of events” (Foucault 1979, 151). Clinging to the knowledge that the traveling players’ repertory was familiar to Hamlet, who requests an “old accustomed” play, Greg finds it more logical to believe that Hamlet’s acquaintance with the method of death in The Murder of Gonzago led to the Ghost’s narrative through a process of unconscious transferral, than that The Murder of Gonzago duplicated the murder of Hamlet Sr.: “This simple assumption at once removes the difficulty of the coincidence, and explains the one obscure point regarding the Ghost’s narrative [i.e. the method of death]. Our chain of evidence is complete” (416).

Greg the textual critic clearly needs to reconcile irreconcilables. The rea- son for this becomes clear in the conclusion to his article:

The current interpretation of Hamlet presupposes an altogether un- reasonable want of dramatic capacity in the author. Shakespeare’s reputation imperatively demands that an alternative should be found.

(GreG 1917, 421)

It is not a unified text that Greg wants so much as a unified author; for him—as for most of the New Bibliographers—the two were linked. Coher- ently unified authors write coherently unified texts. Throughout Greg’s ar- ticle, Hamlet and Shakespeare are one and the same: “I could no more credit [Hamlet] with the conscious evolution of the Ghost’s revelation than I can Shakespeare with its serious composition” (1917, 413); the Ghost’s images of prison and torment are “just those crude and grotesque horrors on which Hamlet’s childhood in that medieval society must have been fed, and from which his more mature nature must have revolted, just as we may imagine Shakespeare’s to have done” (414). In a wildly speculative footnote (421), Greg even suggests that Shakespeare cooperated with the “pirate” Nicholas Ling in publishing Q1 Hamlet (cf. Hamlet’s cooperation with the pirates in Act 4). The symbiosis of author and hero is clear even when Greg is at pains to separate the two: critics have “enquired why Hamlet behaved in a ridicu- lous way, when the question they should have asked was why Shakespeare did—or whether he did” (400). Neither Hamlet nor Shakespeare behaves ridiculously; and that is because Shakespeare, like Hamlet, is “a refined and

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Laurie Maguire: W. W. Greg as Literary Critic | 81

cultivated gentleman in a society of barbarians” (413),8 a constant value in a world of contradiction. It is this desire for a constant author, one who does not change his mind or contradict himself, which leads Greg to rationalize one contradiction in a play full of contradictions.

Greg’s method is, of course, characteristic of the New Bibliographers, but this article is not simply the approach of a textual critic to dramatic duplica- tion. At the start of the century Freud was making the same conflationary critical claims in The Interpretation of Dreams ([1900] 1965, 299):

it can of course only be the poet’s own mind which confronts us in Hamlet. I observe in a book on Shakespeare by Georg Brandes (1896) a statement that Hamlet was written immediately after the death of Shakespeare’s father (in 1601), that is, under the immediate impact of his bereavement and, as we may well assume, while his childhood feel- ings about his father had been freshly revived. It is known, too, that Shakespeare’s own son who died at an early age bore the name of ‘Hamnet,’ which is identical with ‘Hamlet.’9

Note the interpretive and biographical elision—Hamlet equals Shakespeare; Hamnet equals Hamlet—and the certainty with which this elision is ex- pressed: “it can of course only be the poet’s own mind which confronts us in Hamlet [. . .]. ‘Hamnet’ is identical with ‘Hamlet’” (my emphasis). Like Greg, Freud is making a single text out of variants of Hamlet: for Greg the ghost of the senior Hamlet equals Hamlet Jr. just as for Freud Hamnet equals Ham- let. Signifiers are rearranged so that they converge in identity.

* * *

Curiously, the play that both Greg and Freud examine is one that drama- tizes highly conflationary maneuvers. Claudius is the arch-conflater, his characteristic rhetorical mode being the semantic yoking together of in- compatibles in the conflationary figure known as paradox or oxymoron:

8. This statement is applied specifically to Hamlet, but the next sentence, with its comparison of Shakespeare and Hamlet, articulates the comparison implicit in the previous sentence.

9. Freud’s statement here predates his anti-Stratfordian stance (which he did not adopt until the 1920s).

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82 | Textual Cultures 4.2 (2009)

our sometimes Sister, now our Queen, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Haue we, as ’twere, with a defeated ioy, With one Auspicious, and one Dropping eye, With mirth in Funerall, and with Dirge in Marriage, In equall Scale weighing Delight and Dole Taken to Wife;

(TLN 186–92; 1.2.8–14)

Claudius builds on this tactic to conflate signifieds as well as signifiers: his for- eign policy makes “the Night ioynt-Labourer with the day”, resulting in labor- ers’ overtime which “[d]oes not diuide the Sunday from the weeke” (TLN 94, 92; 1.1.78, 76); on the domestic front he makes Gertrude an aunt-mother, him- self an uncle-father, Hamlet a nephew-son.

Hamlet resists such conflationary procedures by mockingly taking them to their extreme. In Act Four he takes his leave of Claudius with “Farewell deere Mother”, a valediction that Claudius instantly corrects to “Thy louing Father Hamlet” (TLN 2713–14; 4.3.49–50). Hamlet justifies his terminology in a syllogism which deconstructs his stepfather’s textual procedures through reductio ad absurdum: “My Mother–Father and Mother is man and wife: man & wife is one flesh, and so my mother” (TLN 2715–16; 4.3.51–52). Hamlet had begun such textual deconstruction in a more localized fashion in Act One with puns on son/sun, kin/kind, which strenuously resist the new seman- tic and emotional relationships. Whether insisting on difference physically, as in his outburst against cosmetics in Q2 (“God hath giuen you one face, and you make your selfes another”: G3r; 3.1.143–44)10 or conceptually, as in his twenty-three uses of the rhetorical figure hendiadys (WriGHt 1981), Ham- let is the champion of separate texts: “I say, we will haue no more Marriages” (TLN 1803; 3.1.147).

However, Hamlet’s separatist textual policy is not as easy to implement as it sounds. The play illustrates this difficulty by extending the parallel-text treat- ment to lines as well as situations, which it defies us to separate. In the closet scene we have a sequence of variant, but closely parallel, statements of the kind which textual scholars are not accustomed to seeing in a single text:

[Gertrude] Hamlet, thou hast thy Father much offended. [Hamlet] Mother, you haue my Father much offended.

10. Hamlet insists on another kind of difference in F: “God has giuen you one pace, and you make yourselfe another” (TLN 1799–1800).

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Laurie Maguire: W. W. Greg as Literary Critic | 83

[Gertrude] Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue. [Hamlet] Go, go, you question with an idle tongue.

(TLN 2386–89; 3.4.9–12)11

The editorial challenge that the play poses is: which version is valid? Is it Hamlet or Gertrude who has offended, Claudius or Hamlet Sr. who has taken offence? The play’s interlinked verbal and situational multiplicities defy us to promote one reading over the other, by offering us a world in which one cannot ask “What’s Hecuba to him?” without considering the validity of the corollary “or he to Hecuba” (TLN 1599; 2.2.559; eWbank 1977, 89). The parallel-texts quoted above present us with a situation in which the alternatives both make perfect sense; the variant texts are both “correct”.12

The editorial agony is extended beyond the relatively simple dichotomy of good versus bad, for every kind of textual copy seems buried in the play’s ac- tion. As a result, categories of copy overlap in Hamlet in a way that foils the neat divisions of the New Bibliography. Polonius dictates a text to Reynaldo; the Ghost gives us a memorial reconstruction; the Players possess an unper- formed or a failed text (the speech Hamlet requests from them “was neuer Acted: or if it was, not aboue once, for the Play [. . .] pleas’d not the Million” [TLN 1480–81; 2.2.435–36]); Hamlet has both to revise and to improvise a text when he is at sea; and Claudius requires a translated text, telling Ger- trude: “There’s matters [Q2: matter] in these sighes. These profound heaues you must translate” (TLN 2587–89; 4.1.1–2). The text is frequently aural (the ears of Denmark, Laertes, and Laertes’ acquaintance are abused with forgèd processes), and insistent that it be transcribed: the Ghost pleads “Marke me” (TLN 683; 1.5.3). The aural and the written coalesce when the characters themselves become writing: Ophelia is a “document in madnesse” (TLN 2930; 4.5.178), Hamlet wears an “Inky Cloake” (TLN 258; 1.2.77), Polonius worries about the potential consequences had he “playd the Deske or Table-booke” (TLN 1165; 2.2.136) to Hamlet’s and Ophelia’s love.

To add to this textual maelstrom, the so-called “good” copies of Q2 (au- thorial foul papers) and F (scribal transcript of a revised authorial fair copy,

11. It is tempting to instate, as do most editors who follow the Folio text, the Q2 reading ‘wicked’ for the Folio’s ‘idle’ at TLN 2389, for the latter reading is gener- ally considered to be a duplication caused by compositorial eyeskip. However, the Folio reading makes sense as it stands, particularly given the parallel sequence it follows, and would not be suspected of error were the Q2 text not available for comparison.

12. For references to Hamlet’s editorial functions, see TLN 2114 and FerGuson 1985, 298, 299.

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84 | Textual Cultures 4.2 (2009)

possibly annotated for use as a playbook [Wells et al. 1987, 146]) have all the signs by which the New Bibliographers assured us we could recognize a “bad” text. The action begins with a character speaking someone else’s lines: Bar- nardo appropriates Francisco’s challenge “Who’s there”.13 Emphatic, closing rhyming couplets are frequently followed by extra-metrical additions, exhor- tative as in “come let’s go”, or a laconically imperative “go”. There are redun- dancies and repetitions, most notably of action (the dumb show for example), but also of lines, as characters regularly miss their exit cues. Thus Francisco is given five exit cues in Act 1, Scene 1, Laertes has five valedictory formulae in Act 1, Scene 2, Hamlet says farewell four times in the nunnery scene, and dismisses Ophelia five times (PecHter 1987, 137).

I have argued elsewhere that Hamlet is the tragedy of an editor who cannot make up his mind and that the problems the bereaved son Hamlet faces in the course of the drama are a paradigm of the tasks which confront the editor in performing his textual ritual over the corpus of the deceased author (maGuire 2002). Hamlet must mediate between alternative texts, one good (the exem- plary Hamlet Sr.), one bad (the arrant knave Claudius). In an attempt to pluck out the heart of the mystery, Hamlet resorts to textual collation: “Looke heere vpon this Picture, and on this, / The counterfet presentment of two Brothers” (TLN 2437–38; 3.4.53–54). To his mother’s criticisms of his text as a construct, a bodiless creation, Hamlet responds, in true editorial fashion, with faith in vocabulary tests: “bring me to the Test / And I the matter will re-word; which madnesse / Would gamboll from” (TLN 2525–27; 3.4.142–44). His initial trust in the ghost is quickly modified by the suspicion that the Ghost’s text may not represent the author, and so its evidence must be tested. The preferred copy- text may be, literally, a copy-text. The play is obsessed with the idea of forgery, misinterpretation, and accidental judgment, couched in the language of tex- tual hermeneutics as much as of revenge ethics (FerGuson 1985, 295). Hamlet becomes the quintessential editor: pulled between variant readings (for the two “texts” have the same stemma, they are brothers), he busily tests his tex- tual theories, but is unable to act.

* * *

Greg’s desire to turn the play Hamlet into something interpretively coherent and unified may have resulted in a literal and problematic article (and it is easy to ridicule it today). But literalism was everywhere in literary criticism

13. Q1 reassigns this question to the sentinel on duty (indicated by a numeral rather than a name) to whom it logically, but not dramatically, belongs.

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Laurie Maguire: W. W. Greg as Literary Critic | 85

at the start of the twentieth century, from Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy to the early Arden editions which solemnly print analytic time schemes of the action. Furthermore, Greg’s forensic attitude to interpretive criticism as a series of problems to be solved, like his approach to bibliography, had its roots in his love of detective fiction (he was an avid reader of Dorothy L. Sayers). In 1928, in an essay on the history of detective fiction, Sayers ex- plains how the detective story could not flourish until methods of collecting evidence and presenting proof had been professionally developed. As long as criminal procedure was based on torture, there could be no detective genre. With the development of the police force and the public understand- ing of what constitutes reliable and scientific evidence came the rise of the detective story. A similar symbiosis is evident in New Bibliographical writ- ing. Subjective responses to texts were tempered by vocabulary tests, surveys of metrical habits, collation, classification, and the “scientific” New Bibliog- raphy. Greg cross-examined texts and looked for contradictions in their wit- nesses, whether he was reading them bibliographically or interpretively. However, Greg’s approach to Hamlet indirectly illustrates a fundamental principle in the play’s structure: that this is a play of duplication and contra- diction couched in textual terms. Post-structuralism has taught us to em- brace such plurality. But in 1917 Greg was responding in the only way possible. What he called incoherent and contradictory we now call (after Barthes) “the pleasure of the text”.

In his prefatory epistle to Greg in What Happens in Hamlet, Dover Wilson observes that “none of the great Shakespearian critics have been editors”; he further observes that in Hamlet “editor, commentator and dramatic critic must go to work as a committee of one” ([1935] 1970, 13).14 He also mentions that he could never discover whether Greg “actually believed in [his] own theory” (4).15 But he acknowledges that “for sheer audacity, close-knit reasoning and specious paralogism [the article is] unique in the history of Shakespeare criti- cism” (4), concluding that Greg’s question (“Did Claudius see the dumbshow?”) proved “a turning-point in the history of Shakespearian criticism” (23). His concluding opinion still stands today.

Magdalen College, Oxford

14. Wilson’s comment here on Hamlet is now axiomatic for all of Shakespeare’s plays.

15. Greg was later to confess that he himself never knew.

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86 | Textual Cultures 4.2 (2009)

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