A rare look at Shakespeare
September 2008 — An exhibit at the Boston Public Library, co-curated by English professors Scott Maisano and Cheryl Nixon as well as several graduate students, “All the World’s a Page: 400 Years of Shakespeare in Print”—on display in the BPL’s Rare Books Exhibition Room through September 30—raises more questions than it answers, serving as a launching pad for an examination of the assumptions students and scholars alike have about William Shakespeare.
The exhibit is the latest in a series produced through a partnership with the BPL, that is led on the UMass Boston side by Nixon, who served as the lead grant writer in a successful effort to land a President’s Creative Economy Grant, the funder of the partnership, which began with a Nixon-curated exhibit, “Crooks, Rogues, and Maids Less Than Virtuous.”
In the current exhibit, the centuries-old books resting behind protective glass are not so much diamonds in the rough as they are hidden jewels: flawed, one-of-a-kind copies of the Bard’s most famous works, each worth millions. The theory behind the display, according to Maisano, is “to show how and why books themselves—as objects free of the content within—influence our understanding of a particular work.”
Maisano said he began mulling this idea last year, and explored it more fully in an essay he wrote for the Shakespeare Yearbook titled “Shakespeare’s Dead Sea Scroll: On the Apocryphal Appearance of Pericles,” about one of Shakespeare’s less-frequently-taught plays. Considered a “bad quarto” because it is not included in Shakespeare’s First Folio (the first “complete” collection of his work, printed in 1623), this play was not an accurate reflection of the Bard’s abilities, according to conventional wisdom. Shakespeare, it was felt, couldn’t have written a bad play; printers must have botched the job.
Maisano, however, saw things in a different light. His article proposed that Pericles was supposed to look like the remnant of a lost civilization, a ravaged land like the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah, and that its faults were not incidental or accidental, but central to understanding the play. As an example, Maisano cites The Norton Complete Works of Shakespeare, a commonly used undergraduate English student’s book, for which editors reconstructed the text of Pericles, removing anything that didn’t jibe with their preconceived ideas of what the play might have looked like before going to print.
“Students will encounter a 20th-century fabrication rather than the play Shakespeare’s contemporaries would have read,” he said. He also pointed out that Hamlet’s most famous line, “To be or not to be, that is the question,” does not appear as such in a 1603 version of the text. So which Hamlet is correct? Maisano says that readers could despair at this lack of consistency, or they can recognize it for what it is: a demand for active interpretation, rather than rote recitation, of Shakespeare’s texts.
By Geoffrey Kula, The University Reporter.
[Contact: Cheryl Nixon; cheryl.nixon@umb.edu]