Riassunto esame Letteratura inglese, Prof. Squeo Alessandra, libro consigliato The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction with Documents, Russ McDonald

Fair copy

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Might be easier to read and so to transcribe and set into type but it would contain

mistakes especially if it were made not by the author but by a employed copyist:

- Mistakes aside, the copyist’s own linguistic and orthographic biases could intrude

The book of the play

• It can be especially perplexing because it may remove us even further from the script.

• It is difficult to know whether certain characteristics of a text deriving from the book of the

play result from an author's design or from the conditions of a theatrical process with which

the author may have had little or even nothing to do:

- Any of these potentially faulty documents might have served as copy text for the printer who

made the play available for public sale and so preserved it for posterity

Þ And still more errors would be introduced in the print shop.

The printing of Renaissance books

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In this context, the first important term to understand is “sheet” the large piece of paper

with which the printer began and which was pressed onto the inked type

• For a folio:

- the sheet was folded once to create two leaves or four pages.

• For a quarto:

- the sheet was folded twice to create four leaves or eight pages.

Þ These folded sheets were then gathered into groups and stitched together:

§ In the case of the First Folio, the sheets were assembled in sixes, with 3 folded sheets

placed within one another to create an assembly of 6 leaves or 12 pages.

§ For a quarto, a single folded sheet producing eight pages was the unit of sewing.

• Pages weren’t printed in numerical order:

- The pages were printed in the order of the gatherings, with the size of the gathering

determining the order of printing.

Þ This system required that the pages be set up in the way they would be folded in the

end.

• The printing process involved two compositors working simultaneously:

- with one starting on page six and working backwards, while the second started on page seven

and worked forwards.

Þ This allowed for the most economical way of printing a text.

The process of casting off copy

• The printer had to estimate the amount of text that would fill each of the 12 pages:

• Once the copy had been cast off began the process of setting type:

- It involves selecting type of metal pieces from small boxes containing each letter and

punctuation mark.

- These pieces of type are formed into words and placed in a frame that is locked into the press.

- A blank sheet is then pressed onto the frame to imprint the text.

- Afterward, the sheet is removed and proof-read.

- The pieces of type are then extracted from the frame, sorted, and returned to their respective

cases.

Consequences

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The chaos in the London print shops of the late 16 century was overwhelming:

- The noise from the printing presses banging together was loud.

- Printing was a dirty job, with large quantities of ink required.

- Print balls made of leather were soaked in human urine to keep them supple, leading to an

influx of flies in the print shops.

- Compositors often worked on multiple books at once, and different houses would print and

bound different parts of a single book.

Þ With these physical challenges, it is no surprise that errors would appear in the printed

versions of Shakespeare's plays.

Shakespeare’s plays in printing

• Of the 18 Shakespeare plays printed in quarto, a majority were printed more than once:

- Some of these reprints indicate the popularity of a particular play:

Þ It was reprinted because the first printing sold out and the demand for it still existed:

§ However, some of the plays may have been reprinted because the first issue

represented an unusually faulty text

Þ These problematic versions are known as “bad quartos”

Bad quartos

• Many of them may have been published illicitly

• In a few cases the appearance of a bad quarto seems to have stimulated Shakespeare’s

company to arrange for the printing of a more accurate version of the text

• Some scholars believe that a bad quarto derived from a reconstructed version of the play by

a person slightly familiar with it:

- Some of these pirated texts are thought to have been invented by actors who had played

small parts in the production and then sought to re-create the play from memory:

Þ For this reason, the bad quartos are said to result from “memorial reconstruction”

• Another new theory concerns that some bad quartos may be early Shakespearean versions of

the play and that the differences between two texts of a play are attributable to

Shakespeare’s own rewriting of the initial version

Textual criticism

• Uncertainties about the alternative versions of a play point to an important shift in modern

thinking about textual scholarship

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After the beginning of the 20 century scholars began to study the process by which

Shakespeare’s texts came into physical being:

- Professor Hinman compared each page of 55 copies of the First Folio and identified

individual pieces of type that had ben damaged in the printing process

- He and other scholars distinguished the work of 5 compositors who set the pages for the

First Folio, discerning their:

§ Spelling preferences

§ Propensity for certain kinds of errors

§ Varying degrees of skill

• The precision of this research produced a spirit of optimism to the enterprise of textual

scholarship. It was based on 2 assumptions:

1. An ideal text of a Shakespeare play did exist

2. A scientific approach would permit scholars to recuperate that text as the author wrote it

• However, postmodern editing has rejected the first of these assumptions, because:

- There was no such thing as a final perfected version of a play

- Shakespeare probably reworked and altered the text continuously during his theatrical life

- The problem of dramatic authorship with actors, scribes and prompters contributing to the

creation of a play makes it naive to fetishize a single text

The Folio

• It seems more solid and reliable that many of the quartos

• Is the only source for almost half of the plays

• The Folio, known as the First Folio, was offered for sale in London in November 1623 for 1

pound

• It contains 36 plays, 18 of which were never printed including Shakespeare’s greatest

achievements

• The Folio project was initiated after the death of Shakespeare, and the key question is the

nature of the materials used for printing:

- To determine the exact words written by Shakespeare, it is important to identify the sources

used by the printers for each play in the Folio:

Þ These sources include:

§ Shakespeare's own manuscripts

§ transcriptions of those manuscripts

§ quarto versions already in print, or a combination of these.

- For plays that were already printed accurately, the quarto version was used as the copy text,

sometimes with corrections or annotations from a manuscript of the same play.

- For plays that were never printed, different types of manuscripts were consulted:

§ Sometimes Shakespeare's own draft, known as foul papers, served as the source.

§ Other times, a clean and legible copy prepared by a scribe was used, although it is not

always clear who the transcript was intended for.

Men and Women: Gender, Family,

Society

VIII Chapter

The situation of women

• In the second half of the sixteenth century the typical role for women was marriage and

motherhood:

- This is not to say that women didn’t work, indeed managing households and raising

children was demanding and often more challenging than men's duties.

Þ Upper-class women had help from servants, while lower-class women did most of

the work themselves.

• Only a few very wealthy women had leisure:

- Modern women have more freedom to follow various paths, including:

§ Marriage

§ Career

§ or choosing not to marry or have children

Þ making the limited options for women in the early modern era seem oppressive.

• To understand these historical limitations, we need to consider the historical, economic, and

philosophical factors that contributed to them:

- In the early modern period, women were unquestionably in a subordinate position to men,

with the belief that this hierarchy was "natural."

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Indeed, many thinkers in the 16 century believed that men were superior to

women:

§ This belief had deep historical roots, with physical strength leading to the

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division of labor in primitive societies the man killed the bear and the

woman cooked it

§ Aristotle's biological explanations and medieval theories about the body

reinforced these gender roles:

They associated the four elements like air and fire, that were

o considered as hot elements, with masculinity and linked them to

bodily humors.

Þ However, this belief in the superiority of masculine qualities was not absolute, as

men could also suffer from excessive heat.

Þ The female body was seen as less capable of maintaining the balance of humors

and elements, partly due to menstruation.

• In medieval and early modern Europe, the subordination of women was justified through both

"scientific" explanations and Christian doctrine, whether in its Catholic or Protestant forms:

- The belief in male superiority was reinforced by biblical passages, particularly the idea

that the husband was the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church.

- Eve's creation after Adam was also used to argue her distance from God.

• The association of women with home and child-rising was further supported by the absence

à

of reliable contraception methods this meant that women gave birth to children who had to

be taken care of

Þ This traditional role of women was developed into an ideology of subordination and

domestic responsibility to ensure social stability.

• While these physiological and ideological restrictions limited women's independence, they

did not completely suppress it:

- Some women resisted their prescribed social roles, like the notable example of Mary Frith,

also known as Moll Cutpurse, who challenged gender norms by wearing men's clothes,

carrying a sword, and smoking a pipe.

Þ A few women even challenged conventions by wearing men's clothing in public,

leading to concerns and sermons against such behavior.

- Married women often became involved in their husband's businesses by helping in the

shop and managing accounts:

Þ Widows of shopkeepers and craftsmen sometimes took control of the businesses after

their husband's death.

Þ Additionally, many English women ventured into the marketplace independently,

engagin