Reactive Shakespeare

One of the most attractive and interesting things about Shakespeare is his reactive capacity—his ability to respond to others, and to say “I see possibilities here,” and to make the ordinary extraordinary. Read Golding’s Ovid or North’s Plutarch and compare (say) Prospero “drowning his book” or Enobarbus appreciating Cleopatra: in each case, the original is pretty good in its own right, but the rewrite is better.

He does the same thing with himself. You can just imagine him looking at an early performance of Richard II and saying “note to self: next time, let the clowns talk prose.” In tragedy, he builds and builds, from Romeo and Juliet, through Julius Caesar on to the incomparable heights of Antony and Cleopatra.

In A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, James Shapiro comes up with a wonderful example that I hadn’t noticed before. That would be Sonnet 138, which I took the trouble to memorize a few years back. But here is an original version, as the opening poem in The Passionate Pilgrim:

When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her (though I know she lies)
That she might think me some untutored youth,
Unskillful in the world’s false forgeries.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although I know my years be past the best:
I, smiling, credit her false-speaking tongue,
Outfacing faults in love with love’s ill rest.
But wherefore says my love that she is young?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O, love’s best habit is a soothing tongue,
And age (in love) loves not to have years told.
Therefore I’ll lie with love, and love with me
Since that our faults in love thus smothered be.

The “revised, standard” version reads:

When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some uuntutor’d youth,
Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days be past the best:
Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue,
On both sides thus is simple truth suppress’d.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O, love’s best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told.
Therefore I lie with her and she with me
And in our faults by lies we flatter’d be.

I’ve italicized the changes (and omitted two sets of superfluous parentheses). I won’t say that every change is an improvement, but it is fascinating to wonder just what Shakespeare had in mind when he edited as he did. Anyway, listen to Shapiro:

The most significant change is also the subtlest. By turning “I know to “she knows” in line 6, a shared understanding and subjectivity is introduced. We are now witnesses to a lover’s game, one in which role-playing leads to mutual understanding. … Only in the revised version does the speaker learn to see himself through his lover’s eyes. We’re n o longer listening to someone brag about an affair; instead, we’re experiencing the excitement and confusion of what it feels like to be in love.

--James Shapiro, A Year in the Life
of William Shakespeare 201 (2005)

There’s plenty more of the same in this stimulating and thought-provoking book.