Guest post by William Ray
The Norton Facsimile of the First Folio of Shakespeare is one of the most respected publications in English scholarship. After a fulsome preface with particular reference to W.W. Greg as the greatest influence on his work, the editor, Charlton Hinman, presents an introduction of eighteen double-columned pages.
The first section is entitled “The First Folio and Its Contents: the Value and Authority of the Text.” Here the editor discussed the bibliographical basis for the work’s preservation, in his view to be shared not for a season but for all time.
I wish to call attention to the epigraph of that section, taken from “[T]he Phoenix and Turtle,” first published in Robert Chester’s “Love’s Martyr or Rosalins Complaint” (1601).
Hinman cites the title as “The Phoenix and the Turtle .” “Turtle” refers to the avian turtle dove, not to a carapaced reptile. The Phoenix is well known in mythic symbolism as the bird risen alive from its own ashes. Thus the poem sequence is about two birds, which the Elizabethans recognized as representing departed spirits.
Hinman quotes lines 53-5 as follows:
Beauty, Truth, and Rarity,
Grace in all simplicity,
Here enclosed lie.
The stanza actually reads:
Beauty, Truth, and Rarity,
Grace in all simplicity,
Here enclosed in cinders lie.
Hinman followed his misquotation with the immediate note: “(last line somewhat altered)”
The editor doubtless meant to utilize this wording to encapsulate the profundity and grace of the Shakespeare canon, of which the First Folio was the first collection. It would be as much as to say, “Within these boards are surpassingly great literary virtues.”
But Charlton Hinman as editor not only got the titling of the poem inaccurately; he also took the liberty of assessing the stanza as mere words loosed from context, altering them to be suitable for his epigraphic purpose.
There was nothing hidden about either the act or intent. However in altering a known text he revealed that he didn’t know or value what the poem was about — or, put differently, why that strikingly worded stanza existed.
Commonly judged, i.e., without the imprimatur of a highly regarded editor, this act of alteration would be considered a bungle. The absence of an ellipse (. . .) becomes one error added upon another. The ellipse would notify the reader immediately of missing material. The rhyme scheme of the stanza is also ruined by the alteration. The end rhymes are verity, simplicity, and (in cinders) lie, lie then being voiced as the sound lee.
The bungle explained, a reader will wonder what am I getting at? Yes, the author of the passage committed unacceptable practice. But with the book published we are in no position for seemingly minor corrections.
In reply, we have witnessed a major error of literary interpretation at the beginning of a landmark facsimile of the First Folio. Editor Hinman gave naif evidence he had no idea of the significance and importance of the verse he distorted for stylistic effect, thereby disrespecting the same author he intended to exalt.
This begs the question for us the readers, what is the rest of the story? Why did “The Phoenix and Turtle” matter in the life and work of the author, memorialized to us in the Norton Folio facsimile as William Shakespeare? What is the meaning of “in cinders lie”?
Read as a dirge, or as the poem’s language alludes, a ‘threne’ or threnody, we learn of two departed spirits and a third, the ‘treble-dated crow’, referenced as Rarity, a half-godly figure associated with the other two.
The line that Hinman did not comprehend and importuned to alter comes into focus now: “Here enclosed, in cinders lie.” The ‘Phoenix’ and ‘Turtle’ bodies have been interred to the ground, yet the spirits fly free, symbolically birds in the author’s metaphoric lexicon.
The following stanzas expand on that tragic scene:
‘Death is now the Phoenix nest,
And the Turtle’s loyal breast,
To eternity doth rest.
‘Twas not their infirmity,
It was married Chastity.
Leaving no posterity,
Truth may seem, but cannot be,
Beauty brag, but tis not she,
Truth and Beauty buried be.
And to close the threnody:
To this urn let those repair,
That are either true or fair,
For these dead Birds, sigh a prayer.’
Editor Charlton Hinman’s use of a misread or ill-considered poem, penned by his subject,––an error receiving no notice at all much less opprobrium by Shakespeare traditionalists––turns a glaring spotlight upon a general aphasia or blindness in Shakespeare canon criticism.
Obvious historical allusions must not be passively ignored. Elizabeth I was frequently named “Beauty” (as well as “Fair”); “Truth” is the English equivalent of Veritas, central to the motto of Edward Vere (Vero Nihil Verius), and “Rarity” represents a figure both considered somehow supernal; the dedicatee of Shake-speare’s Sonnets, Lucrece, and Venus and Adonis –– Henry Wriosthesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton.
This is the rest of the story, one yet to be told in full.
Reference: The Norton Facsimile, The First Folio of Shakespeare, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, 1968
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