Shakespeare’s reading…

…Robert S. Miola ISBN 0-19-871169-7 (paperback) O.U.P.

The newest scholarship on the subject is presented in this book. Your humble thief, who learned from the best, remains determined to steal from the best, when his best is not good enough. So here for your edification is a tieved summary of the introduction and final chapters in this book.

‘G.B. Shaw, an Irishman, praised Shakespeare’s gift of telling a story (provided someone told it to him first)’.

Sh freely borrowed characters, plots, and ideas, and as freely ignored or contradicted them too. He used several sources simultaneously for character or incident. Today this is known as plagiarism, but then it was known as imitatio, or creative imitation. The genius was in the transformation, not the invention.

Schoolboy practice in Sh’s time was reading, translating, and writing, from Latin to English and back again. This happened all day as schoolboys experience it, over a period of about 10 years, which fostered habits one assumes of thinking, reading, and writing.

A schoolboy’s inner ear would be developed through the Elizabethan love of word-play: repartee, double-entendre, puns, and quibbles. Unless he was a thickie. All this reading aloud and reciting verse, necessarily puts an emphasis on memory.

Their literary culture was of quotation and allusion, usually of the Classics and the Bible. The use of Commonplace books was encouraged to collect and retain this knowledge.

Reading was, Miola argues, associative and eclectic, simultaneous and synchronic.

The precedence was given to Copia, or abundance over accuracy, to pieces of individual texts over contexts, multiplicity over coherence.

Reading was less logical and more analogical i.e. across texts, looking for parallels, a mix and matching of texts and stories.

The Elizabethans were active readers, trained to find arguments for and against, within any given text. They would often make marginalia, or notes in the margin, which would form a dialogue with the text. (I do the same, it’s fun)!

Often texts were read aloud, meaning group sessions were not uncommon. This also means there were readers and hearers and that their reading was public, social and participatory.

The core curriculum of shared sources would be the Latin and Greek Classics, the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Protestant horror book, Foxe’s Acts and Martyrs. Texts were available to the public in manuscript, to which end thousands of scriveners and scribes remained employed.

Printed texts were available in Broadsides (single sheet), Chapbooks (up to 24 pages), Pamphlets (bit more expensive, sensational and topical) and Books (which arrived in varying sizes of Octavo, Quarto and Folio).

Renaissance books then differ: in format, in construction, in punctuation, in spelling, in typeface, and in language. Latin being the language of educated discourse.

Moreover there was a strong didactic impulse, focusing on political and moral conditions. There were an awful lot of Sermons, Homilies and Devotional literature. And many literary and historical texts have polemical prefaces and notes, elucidating the content for the early modern reader.

Shakespeare’s focus is often on moral concerns, a vocabulary of ethics, standards of conduct, and choices between right and wrong.

For examples of this argument feel free to buy this book and read the other chapters. Or visit your local University library, which is what i did.

The reading habits of Shakespeare that can be sifted from Miola’s study are tenfold:

1. Sh. read competitively
2. Sh. read eclectically
3. Sh focused on Dramatic character
4. Sh expanded the role of his women (i.e. female characters)
5. Sh romanticised Eros, and focused on Love
6. Sh increased the ethical and intellectual complexity of his sources
7. Sh added to his sources comic characters and subplots
8. Sh emphasised contrast in Locality within the play eg Court vs Country
9. Sh read retentively and reminiscently
10. Sh read experimentally and defiantly

Miola’s conclusion, (as is mine own), is that Shakespeare as a working man of the theatre (can’t stress that job description enough) read, consulted, wrote, doctored, revised, watched, rehearsed, and acted, in hundreds of scenes and plays. His method proves to be flexible, accessible and expandable.

And here’s the point as far as i’m concerned with this book, because I thought i’d never agree with it, hating theory as i do. Miola thanks the new theories of literature for allowing this kind of investigation and revision of Shakespearean study.

As he says, a new model is created for engaging with the past. A model that is horizontal and associative, showing that texts exist in complicated cultural relations as ‘intertexts’. This means early modern texts that Shakespeare never read can be used to show us a context in which his texts can be read. That’s new historicism isn’t it?

I try to read his sonnets with all this intertextuality in mind. I have on one level 154 sonnets as a series. I have on a lower level individual and series of sonnets within that series of 154.

I have at the lowest level between 140-154 syllables in each particular sonnet, with a few exceptions. These are all essentially connected and mark the quest from the page to the stage.

But what happens when you connect the text to your memory and bring these page-bound, still-born letters back to life and sound them off at the drop of a hat. It becomes an experiment in wit and will. The closest thing to their original intent.