Abstract
Darwin, writing in this instance to the botanist Hooker about the classification of genera and species in plants, is normally credited with the division, since taken up in other contexts, between those who prefer precise and minute distinctions and those seeking larger organizing categories. The world needs both, Darwin suggests, and perhaps further suggests that each of us needs to entertain both modes of thought: without his fine observation of the varieties of Galapagos finches larger theories may never have arisen in the form for which he is now famous. So, in early modern studies, editorial theory in the first half of the twentieth century was dominated by lumpers, given to dismissing variant dramatic texts as “bad,” and producing as the best products of their work, for example, Kenneth Muir’s King Lear (1952), or, at the late extreme, Harold Jenkins’s Hamlet (1982), both for the Arden Shakespeare series. Splitters moved decisively into the field in the 1980s, giving us two texts of King Lear in the Oxford Shakespeare (1982), while the latest Arden Hamlet appeared as three texts in two distinct volumes (2006). The splitting of Hamlet could further continue by including plays for which we no longer have the texts, and one other text deriving from touring players in Germany. E. K. Chambers thought that earlier allusions to Hamlet or Hamlet, 1588–96, as well as later allusions to non-Shakespearean “Hamlet” lines, 1608–1620, were all to one unitary play, eventually owned by Shakespeare’s company, and thus the source text for Shakespeare’s version(s).2
“It is good to have hair-splitters and lumpers.”
(Charles Darwin, letter to J. D. Hooker, August 1, 1857)1
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Notes
The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, ed. Frederick Burkhardt, et al., 20 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985–2013), 6.438.
E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930), 1.411–12.
For a sceptical approach to this phenomenon, see Laurie Maguire, “Misdiagnosing Memorial Reconstruction in ‘John of Bordeaux’,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 11 (1999): 114–28.
Paul Werstine, “Narratives about Printed Shakespeare Texts: ‘Foul Papers’ and ‘Bad Quartos’,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 65–86, and Werstine’s recent book, Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
See Roslyn Lander Knutson, The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company 1594–1613 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991): 50–3.
For a review of revisionist arguments about the occasion and its significance, see Jason Scott-Warren, “Was Elizabeth I Richard II?: the Authenticity of Lambarde’s ‘Conversation’,” Review of English Studies 64 (2013): 208–30, 208–10.
R. A. Foakes, ed., Henslowe’s Diary, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 204.
A silent film of Samson and Delilah was made in 1902; the talkie of Cecil B. DeMille dates from 1949. See David J. Shepherd, The Bible on Silent Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
See Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Beaumont’s title recalls that of the old play “The Knight in the Burning Rock”, something of a scenic extravaganza, played at court in 1579.
N. W. Bawcutt, ed., The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama: The Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels 1623–73 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 148.
Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (London, 1612), G2 r-v.
See Tiffany Stern, “Apocryphal Stories: ‘The Forgery of some modern Author’?: Theobald’s Shakespeare and Cardenio’s ‘Double Falsehood’,” Shakespeare Quarterly 62 (2011): 555–93.
See Clifford Leech, The John Fletcher Plays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962).
See the review by Brian Vickers of The Cambridge Jonson, Times Literary Supplement (24 January 2014): 3–5.
G. E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941–68), 7.40.
See C. R. Baskervill, “A Prompt Copy of A Looking Glass for London and England,” Modern Philology 30 (1932): 29–51.
Malone Society Collections VI (Oxford: Malone Society, 1962), 119.
See David Starkey, ed., The Inventory of King Henry VIII (London: Harvey Miller, 1998).
Scott McMillin, “Building Stories: Greg, Fleay and the Plot of 2 Seven Deadly Sins,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 4 (1989): 53–62, 59.
David Kathman, “Reconsidering ‘The Seven Deadly Sins’,” Early Theatre 7 (2004): 13–44.
See Tiffany Stern, “‘On each Wall / And Corner Post’: Playbills, Title-pages, and Advertising in Early Modern London,” English Literary Renaissance 36 (2006): 57–84.
W. W. Greg, Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouses, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931), Commentary volume, 96.
Reference to the text of The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd edn. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
See Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
See Adam Fox, “Ballads, Libels, and Popular Ridicule in Jacobean England,” Past and Present, 145 (1994): 47–83. The material formed part of Fox’s subsequent book Oral and Literate Culture in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. 321. Fox cited James’s defence statement, but not the text of the jig itself, contained in Bressy’s complaint, for which see “Afterpiece.”
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Astington, J.H. (2014). Lumpers and Splitters. In: McInnis, D., Steggle, M. (eds) Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137403971_6
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