A few days ago, we took a long hard look at James Shapiro’s faux pas in claiming, in Contested Will, that the first appearance of the name Shakespeare in print, on the dedicatory page of the first edition of Venus and Adonis (1593), is hyphenated.
It’s not. See for yourself (Figure 1):
It is neither italicized nor hyphenated.
We also saw that Shapiro builds on this misconception to create an elaborate theory that the name is hyphenated in a significant number of later publications only to avoid the typographical problem which could result from placing a -k- next to an long italic -s- such that the two letters would collide and “break,” creating a messy delay in the print shop.
The theory is not originally Shapiro’s own, but that’s a subject for another post.
Shapiro, who admits to prefer studying Shakespeare in performance rather than in the study, and seems to have a rather dim understanding of what goes on in an early modern print shop, has apparently never heard of the typesetter’s device known as a “spacer” – a thin metal blank, existing in five different widths.
Such blanks were regularly used by early modern compositors to avoid the problem of colliding letters; they allowed compositors to introduce white space as needed to regulate the distribution of printed letters without needing to use any hyphens.
However, there’s a lot more to be said about Shapiro’s gaffe.
Let’s resume our discussion with this quote, in which Shapiro advanced this already defunct claim about the hyphen:
dedicatory letters addressed to the Earl of Southampton and signed ‘William Shake-speare’ are included in italics in the front-matter of both. (“Advance Reviewers Copy,” 226)
Of course this statement is misleading for more than one reason: the letters aren’t actually “signed” with Shakespeare’s name – the name is printed on the page. Nor, as we have seen, is the name spelled “Shake-speare,” as Professor Shapiro assures us it is.
But there is another problem posed by an ambiguity in Shapiro’s wording, which remains to be investigated. Is he actually claiming that the name is italicized, or just the “letter” (technically known, in bibliographical parlance as a ,“dedicatory epistle”)?
Beats me.
But it does make a difference.
As even a fourth grader can see, the name is not (unlike the words in the preceding dedicatory epistle) italicized, so if Shapiro meant to say that it was, he may be on the verge of setting a Guinness book of world record for the number of erroneous statements about one tiny piece of early modern typography.
On the other hand, to give Shapiro the benefit of the doubt (temporarily, of course!), if the name were italicized but not hyphenated, then his theory would have failed before it started, so perhaps its a good thing that he was wrong about the facts.
Its always been my own motto to never let a fact get in the way of a better theory, and I guess that Professor Shapiro and I are brothers under the skin in that regard.
And while one hates to cast undocumented aspersions, it does occur that perhaps this dilemma could explain an ambiguity in Shapiro’s narrative; for while he seems certain that the name is hyphenated, he seems to be less certain whether or not it’s italicized.
In a strict grammatical construction, he’s not saying that it is. But I venture to suggest that most readers without a copy of the Venus and Adonis dedication page in front of them, would conclude that Shapiro means to also claim that the name is italicized, especially since he builds on this assumption in the analysis which follows.
Certainly, if Shapiro knew that the name was printed in Roman type, he didn’t go out of his way to make that clear.
In any case, it’s Shapiro’s lucky day in the scholarship sweepstakes: his factual error ends up supporting his theory: anyone can see that the name is not italicized, and if anyone is in a mood to make excuses for Professor Shapiro, he could reason as follows: “unlike the dedicatory epistle, the name is clearly printed in Roman and not Italic type. That explains why it’s not hyphenated.”
Right?
Wrong.
In part I we already saw the example from the 1623 folio of the hyphenated name printed in Roman type, but there are many others as well.
Let’s take a look at the actual earliest appearance of the hyphenated name, “Shake-speare.”
It’s from a dedicatory poem to a mysterious and pseudonymous 1594 publication, Willowbie His Avisa.
Avisa has a long and intriguing publication history, but since it has little to do with our present quest, and the history would no doubt put professor Shapiro to sleep, let’s focus on the essentials, shall we?
Its not surprising that the interests Shapiro represents would want to distract attention away from Avisa by inventing a cock and bull story about the name “Shake-speare” being italicized and hyphenated in the 1593 edition of Venus and Adonis.
While the name as it appears in that context reassures us by connecting the author with the flesh-and-blood Henry Wriosthley, stabilizing our preconceptions about the author and his milieu, the hyphenated form in Avisa, the very first critical notice of the poet “Shakespeare,” seems more inclined to induce vertigo than complacency in the average Stratfordian college professor (Figure 2):
Note the Roman type.
Not only is the name hyphenated for the first time in Willowbie his Avisa, but the publication itself is not only coyly pseudonymous but contains an extensive mock-serious discussion of concealed authorship in its introductory materials.
The close reader may even notice that the logic of the passage associates “Shake-speare,” by parallelism, with a fictional character in his own poem – the rapist Tarquin, who steals the jewel of Lucrece’s female honor while her husband, Collatine, is off sporting about in Italy (I refer to RL, 106-112).
Have we just run smack dab into our first good clue that Elizabethans could read, god forbid, allegorically?
Could this association between Tarquin and “Shake-speare” have meant something?
Hold that thought – we’ll fish in that stream another day. For now, let’s just note this in passing: for Stratfordians, Shapiro’s book is not the moment of glory they had anticipated.
But there is another, more subtle problem here.
It gets worse the more one digs. In Avisa the hyphenated name is not, as Shapiro’s theory requires us to predict, italicized. Also contrary to Shapiro’s statement of fact and theory, it is spelled with the -e- after the k.
It is now possible to see why Professor Shapiro began his analysis with a false statement of where the hyphen occurs. From the very first appearance of the hyphenated name in the historical record, it appears in suspicious circumstances that any credible detective would consider probative.
Professor Shapiro does not come off as one offering a scholarly analysis by a distinguished academician dispassionately examining evidence, but as a gifted storyteller with the “gift of gab,” an ax to grind, and a rather low standard of the ethics of debate.
As John Thomas Looney wrote in reply to O.J. Campbell’s 1948 review of “Shakespeare” Identified, “This is the kind of argumentation one associates with political maneuvering rather than a serious quest for the truth on great issues and it makes one suspect that he is not very easy in his own mind about the case.”
But, wait a minute. Surely there are some examples of Elizabethan typography which actually do support Professor Shapiro’s argument. Aren’t there?
After all, I can hear you saying, Stritmatter, you teach at Coppin State University in Urban Baltimore. James Shapiro is an important man and a distinguished scholar; he hails from the heart of the Ivy League, hobnobs over tea and biscuits at the Folger library, and gets paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to write books like Contested Will. You’re a blogger who doesn’t get paid anything and teaches on North Avenue in Baltimore! Who are you to question his scholarship?
There are by my count (which may be incomplete) 6 independent occurrences of the hyphenated name on the title pages of early Shakespearean texts. These are Richard II Q2 (1598), Richard III Q2 (1598), Hamlet Q1 (1601), SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS (1609), King Lear Q1 (1608), and Romeo and Juliet Q3 (possibly Q4, date uncertain, see Chambers I: 340).*
Of these, all but Hamlet continue the hyphenation in at least one successive edition.
There are, additionally, eight other texts, printed between 1594 and 1623, in which the name is hyphenated. Aside from the Sonnets, the largest number of examples occurs in the 1623 folio, in which poems by Leonard Digges (3x) and I.M. (2x) consistently hyphenate the name.
Now, the inquiring mind wants to know: how many of these examples conform to the requirements set forth by Shapiro’s analysis, that the hyphen is required when the name is set in italics and spelled Shakspeare – without the medial –e-?
None.
At least three of the examples (Richard II Q2, “I.M.”, Sh. Folio 1623, and John Webster, 1612), are italicized, yet each also spells the name Shake-speare, with the medial -e-, obviating the logic of Professor Shapiro’s argument.
More typical is this example from the first quarto of Hamlet (Figure 3) – where there is obviously no more danger of breaking any type by removing the hyphen than there would be in removing it from such conspicuous examples of early modern pseudonyms as Lucres-Avis (Avisa, 1594, A4v), Martin Mar-prelate, Tom Tell-truth, or Cuthbert Curry-knave.
Lear Q1 prints “Shak-speare,” with the hyphen and without the medial -e-, but in Roman type face.
This is corrected in Lear Q2 within less than a year to “Shake-speare,” suggesting that, contrary to Shapiro’s initial assumption, the normative literary spelling of the name was Shakespeare, or Shake-speare, not Shakspeare.
For anyone who believes that theories should be rooted in verifiable facts, Shapiro’s goes downhill fast from here.
Enter, stage left, John Bodenham’s (1600) Bel-vedére, the first collection of popular Elizabethan lyrics to include many selections from Shakespeare’s plays and poems. It spells the name, in italics, Shakspeare – without the medial -e- and without any hyphenation!
Five ways from Sunday, Shapiro’s theory is apparently not worth the paper used to print it:
1) It departs from a manifest error (there is no hyphenated form of the name in Venus and Adonis Q1);
2) It follows this error by insinuating another false claim (that the name is not only hyphenated but italicized in Venus and Adonis);
3) It depends on the undemonstrated (and apparently false) proposition that “Shakspeare” was the normative print spelling of the name;
4) It ignores or suppresses numerous instances of positive evidence (e.g. the title pages of Hamlet Q1, Lear Q1, and SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS) which disprove it;
5) It ignores or suppresses instances of negative evidence (e.g. Bel-vedére) which, independently, also disprove it.
If we return once more to Shapiro’s narrative with these examples in mind, it is easy to wonder just what he must have been thinking when he invented the story about the hyphenated name in Venus and Adonis.
Does he believe his own story? Apparently so. His explanation for a typographical dilemma, the existence of which is predicated on a single false example, and which every known actual example contradicts, is that
The easiest solution was inserting a letter ‘e’, a hyphen or both; as we’ll soon see, compositors settled on different strategies. And as the title pages of the 1608 quarto of Lear and the 1609 Sonnets indicate, it’s a habit that carried over when setting roman font as well. (“Readers Advance Edition,” 226)
But if there never was any typographical rationale for the first uses of the hyphen, one cannot very well explain later uses as instances of habit established through precedent.
And the sole example which might conform, barely, to Shapiro’s model is not, as he has so glibly led his readers to believe, the first, but actually the last, or nearly the last,in the series (“I.M.” in the 1623 folio). Even in the best of all possible Stratfordian worlds, it cannot therefore logically have had any impact whatsoever on the typographical practices informing the prior examples.
Finally, anyone who pauses long enough to test alternative theories must realize that it makes no sense at all to suggest that the compositors of SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS would have included an unnecessary hyphen in the name in 32 running half-titles of that book merely out of loyalty to the precedent established in, say Hamlet Q1, a book which they may never have seen.
The very suggestion reveals Shapiro’s alienation from the gritty circumstances of early modern book producers, who favored economy and thrift over adherence to irrelevant precedent, and would have more readily laughed at Shapiro’s ignorance of their trade than at the informed suspicions of the Oxfordians.
No. Whatever reason the publishers and compositors of the Sonnets and other texts had for hyphenating the name Shake-speare, it is safe to conclude that it is not the one offered, with such sweeping and grandiloquent authority but so little credibility, by Professor Shapiro.
Before I sign off prudence obliges a disclaimer.
Here’s what I have not said in this blog post.
I am not claiming that the existence of the hyphenated variants in the printed versions of the name Shakespeare between 1594 and 1623 obliges the modern scholar to conclude that anyone thought that the name was a pseudonym.
Naturally, it would be convenient for Professor Shapiro if I made such a claim. His cup overfloweth with examples of unprincipled use of the straw man argument of imputing beliefs never held by his critics.
The fact is, I don’t really know why these typographical irregularities occur.
Shapiro is the Professor from Columbia with all the answers. I’m just a blogger from Baltimore, who barely got through graduate school without having his Department shut down by Professor Shapiro’s “colleagues” and sources of “scholarship.”
But, knowing that I don’t know, I cannot help but wonder if, just possibly, the “holy hyphen” (as Richard Kennedy dubbed it) signifies exactly what Shapiro goes to such extravagant, contradictory, and imprecise lengths to deny it does.
As the aphorism goes, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And this sure is a lot of smoke being blown in the eyes of the jury over one little hyphen.
In any case, it seems safe to offer at least one probative conclusion: if anyone had no prior basis for questioning the reasoning employed by the Shakespearean elite to sustain the cliché that “Shakespeare is Shakespeare,” then this little parable of the “notorious hyphen” provides a damn good illustration of why everyone should revisit his or her assumptions about authorship.
Indeed one is irresistibly reminded of the acerbic comment of former Folger Library Educational Director Richmond Crinkley, summarizing the history of similar errors documented in Charlton Ogburn’s Mysterious William Shakespeare – a book which James Shapiro can hardly bring himself to mention: ”if the intellectual standards of Shakespeare scholarship quoted in such embarrassing abundance by Ogburn are representative, then it is not just authorship about which which we have to be worried.”
Ironically, these words were published in the Folger Library’s own Shakespeare Quarterly in 1985.
A quarter century later, Shapiro represents an industry that seems incapable of serious self-examination, reconciliation with its own troubled past, or correction of its own long history of logical fallacies, mistakes of fact, or outright fibs.
Any reasonable person must wonder why Professor Shapiro would enlist the weighty authorities cited in the “acknowledgments” section of his book, and get paid the huge sums of money he’s banked, and be invited to narrate his own BBC documentary to back up his printed fallacies with the imprimatur of the mass media, on the back of a theory which is so manifestly erroneous from a factual point of view and so twisted from a logical one.
If someone really did pay Shapiro a million bucks for this book, then I hope they have a really big truck. They’re going to need it to carry away all the bullshit they paid for.
Originally posted By Roger Stritmatter on April 18, 2010
*I’d like to acknowledge the assistance of the late Robert Detobel – gifted friend and scholar – in assembling these data.
Comments
7 Responses to “James Shapiro and the “Notorious Hyphen,” Part II”
- hewardwilkinson says:
April 20, 2010 at 5:32 pm
Dear Roger
Following my previous comment on part I, I just want to impishly note that your commentary about signatures is VERY Derridean!! and contextual deconstruction of what Shapiro is doing is precisely what we are up to.
http://hydra.humanities.uci.edu/derrida/sec.html
(see the end!)
Heward
- Roger Stritmatter says:
April 20, 2010 at 5:59 pm
Heward,
Thanks for the challenge to reconsider Derrida. Give me a day or to do some further reading before I comment.
Cheers,
RAS
- hewardwilkinson says:
April 20, 2010 at 6:30 pm
Roger
Writing from the middle of the Irish Sea, driven there by the great Icelandic Thunder god, under the auspices of Hamlet’s Mill no doubt, I am perforce compelled to be patient!
Of course!
Heward
- hewardwilkinson says:
April 20, 2010 at 6:37 pm
PS for the delightful ‘counterfeited signature’ in its photographic form:
http://www.mcgill.ca/files/crclaw-discourse/Signature_Event_Context.pdf
This link no longer works – Ed. 2022
- Some Love Links | knitwitted says:
December 24, 2010 at 6:19 pm
[…] A most lovely article regarding Mr. Shapiro’s book published under the tome de plumet Contested Will. So as not to give away the plot, I won’t reveal the original name of the book has been critically reasoned to have been Will-tested Con. By all means, please do not be remiss and fail to follow that part of the article which has been continued here. […]
- richard waugaman says:
June 3, 2011 at 9:03 pm
Shapiro has apparently launched something of a Save the Hyphen movement.
He has now been one-upped.Boris Borukhov, in the June, 2011 Notes & Queries, seriously proposes that Shake-speare signed his name with the hyphen. He concludes this from
the fact that Robert Chester’s 1601 Love’s Martyr included the
editor’s statement that “writers whose names are subscribed” to their
poems meant the editor had seen Shakespeare’s manuscript of his poem,
signed with a hyphen. Borukhov knows perfectly well this only means
the authors’ names are printed below their poems. But the editors of
Notes & Queries seem to have decided that things are getting a bit
desperate for the traditional theory, if they found this article
worthy of publication. Doesn’t anyone read the Journal of
Onomastics?? Thomas E. Murray published a crucial article that shows
hyphenated last names only became common in England in the 19th
century [“The overlooked and understudied onomastic hyphen,” Names: A
Journal of Onomastics 50 (2002):173-190].
- Roger Stritmatter says:
June 9, 2011 at 11:44 am
How interesting, Richard. Thanks so much for the reference. This just goes to show that Stratfordians can invent anything they like. Too bad that N & Q would fall for such balderdash.
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