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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
“Disintegration,” Sir Edmund Chambers has said, “is a constant itch in some minds.” And in order to show how pervasive the disease is, I hope I may be forgiven for using as my example Sir Edmund himself. It is to him, surely, that we owe the most today for our belief and faith that the plays in the 1623 folio are by Shakespeare alone and are, by and large, as they left Shakespeare's pen once and for all. In his British Academy lecture of 1924, “The Disintegration of Shakespeare,” Chambers showed (a) that contemporary records, Henslowe's and Sir Henry Herbert's, showed “very little testimony” for revision of old plays and (b) that the first principles and so-called proofs of the disintegrators could not bear careful investigation. Now what is to me so wonderful about this 1924 lecture is that whereas the author of The Elizabethan Stage (1923) may fairly, I believe, be called a nineteenth-century scholar, the man who wrote William Shakespeare, A Study of Facts and Problems (1930) not only has learned everything that McKerrow and Greg have to teach but also is more than able to meet Pollard and Wilson on their own ground. In other words, in the space of about seven years, Sir Edmund changed into what I might call a brilliant conservative. In the 1930 volumes, the disintegrators get even shorter shrift than they had received in the 1924 lecture. “Not proved” is the verdict against them again and again.
A lecture delivered at the Fifth Annual Shakespeare Conference, Stratford-upon-Avon, 17 August 1951.
1 William Shakespeare (Oxford, 1930), i, 486.
2 Footnote, p. 21; Elizabethan Stage (Oxford, 1923), iii, 423.
3 I do not mean to be unfair, but Chambers certainly straddled the fence in the problem of Shakespeare's sole authorship of Titus Andronicus. He himself wrote: “I am sorry to be so inconclusive, but the complicated data are themselves so” (i, 320).
4 Chambers also saw stratification in 2 and 3 Henry VI: “Clifford's speech in 3 Henry VI, v. 2, 31-65, seems to me clearly of later style than the rest. It is certainly Shakespearian.... The pastoral of 3 Henry VI, ii.5, may also be later Shakespeare, though not so late” (i, 286).
5 That Chambers' great authority supported and supports the disintegrators in their efforts is not merely inference on my part. See J. Dover Wilson, “Malone and the Upstart Crow,” Shakespeare Survey IV (1951), p. 59: “Chambers himself admits the presence of a second or third hand in 1 Henry VI, Titus, and The Taming of the Shrew, though he prefers the word ‘collaboration’ to ‘revision’ in describing Shakespeare's part.”
6 Capell's Shakespeare (1767), i, 41-45.
7 Shakespeare's History Plays (New York, 1946), p. 139.
8 “The Authorship of Titus Andronicus,” JEGP, xlii (1943), 55-81; Construction in Shakespeare (Univ. of Michigan Press, 1951), pp. 37-41. See also his “Mirror-Scenes in Shakespeare,” J. Q. Adams Memorial Studies (Washington, 1948), pp. 101-112.
9 William Shakespeare, i, 324.
10 This is a very free paraphrase. A literal translation out of context is misleading. Horace is giving his young friends sound classical doctrine: the need to distinguish between blind and enlightened imitation.
11 Johnson's Shakespeare (1768), iv, 589; Capell's Shakespeare (1767), i, 38.
12 William Shakespeare, i, 290-291.
13 Hardin Craig, An Interpretation of Shakespeare (New York, 1948), p. 49.
14 T. M. Parrott, Shakespearian Comedy (Oxford Univ. Press, 1949), pp. 207-208.