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Max Minckler ’10 (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.) is a Marquis Scholar majoring in English. This year, Minckler is working as an EXCEL Scholar with Suzanne Westfall, professor and head of English. He is working to create an internet edition of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The following is a first-hand account of Minckler’s experiences with the project.
Professor Westfall slammed down upon her desk a book, a foot wide and nearly two feet long. It was as thick as the breadth of my hand, with a deceptive, dark blue cover. The book, if book is the appropriate term (tome might be better), emanated age and importance and the kind of resigned lethargy that only “canon” can elicit.
We sat there, the book on its desk, I on my cushion-less chair, and considered each other. For a moment I could have sworn I heard the faintest, most papery of snickers ruffle the pages. I glared the book down. “The Folio,” Professor Westfall pronounced. “The Folio,” I growled. “THE FOLIO,” stated the book in the gold lettering along its spine. A haughty, British air filled the room.
My task during the fall of 2007 was an extension of the “Internet Shakespeare Editions” project based in Canada’s University of Victoria that is directed at developing a comprehensive, interactive, online, and fully public database of Shakespeare’s works. Researchers, interns, and professors from across the country have been working for some years on the project, each assigned a particular piece of Shakespeare’s body of work, his life, modern adaptations, etc.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or A Midsommer Nights Dreame, or A Midsommer nightes dreame fell, in whichever form it presented itself, as my particular charge. I was to crosscheck the “original” version of Midsummer against the html version debuting online, and compose and insert annotations where I felt readers needed a hand.
The version of the Folio I analyzed was labeled Folio I, published in 1623. Entranced, I turned from page to page of what I though were the original printings of each of Shakespeare’s work. The kicker came two weeks later, when a second original Folio caught my attention online, then a third, an original quarto, a second, and a third. “The Original.” Every one of them.
I was to become profoundly aware of an aspect of literature seldom, if ever, made evident to anyone alien to the upper echelons of English education or the dustiest extremes of the public library: textbooks lie. Pick up any literature textbook including Shakespeare and the versions of his work. You’ll find there are clean, kempt organisms who present themselves in understandable, “modern” English, absent grammatical, spelling, or syntactic contradictions and mistakes. These are singular beasts, which hold their chins high, and consider themselves original versions, the true versions, thank you very much. Haughty they are, and incorrect as well.
The truth is that the “original versions” were in fact just that – “versions” – deemed by panels of publishing house editors and modern educators to be the closest approximations possible of Shakespeare’s works. The “original” Shakespearean publications were written during a time without established grammatical or spelling rules, and have come to us across time sans scribbles in the margins from our buddy Billy indicating a stamp of authenticity.
Shakespeare’s plays were printed after his death by the players that performed them, often a few times, in a few different places, and always with more than just a few alterations. Thus Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and all the rest come to us in a manner of model and make, often with wildly different and contradictory interiors, paint jobs, decals, handling, and acceleration, not to mention insurance rates.
This was a stunning realization for me and one I feel few readers ever encounter. Grasping that the great works I’d been spoon-fed were in fact educated guesses and assemblages of what might have been what the author actually wrote kicked the pedestals out from under them, so to speak. Somehow knowing that a classic may not be authentic robs it of its reverential status, its literary holiness.
Oddly enough, this disillusionment brought the works emotionally closer to home than they had ever been for me. If precise wording becomes suspect, then I step away conceptually from the drudgeries of line-by-line analysis and connect more closely with what Shakespeare’s works truly are – plays. Plays to be performed, enjoyed, laughed at, agreed with, disbelieved, praised, and ridiculed; living, breathing things fueled by actual actors concerned less for the exactness of their memorization than the tear on the cheek of the woman in the first row.
I feel that if the perception of Shakespeare’s work as dusty, densely-worded dogma met with the realization that “originals” are not at the wheel here, but “experiencers,” Will’s work might come alive to many more readers. The snooty, two-foot folio is not the authority on the experience, but the vehicle for that experience. The authenticity of the words aside, that experience shines through.