Bernice Kliman’s Enfolded Hamlet
King’s College London
If you have read Ann Thompson’s essay about Teena Rochfort Smith, you will always remember the story of this gifted Shakespearean who died tragically at the age of twenty-one in 1883, after making a start on an edition of Hamlet and a relationship with the most colourful literary scholar of the age, Frederick J. Furnivall.1 Her edition used six different styles of type, along with stars, daggers, and vertical bars, to mark many kinds of differences among the three early texts of the play; they highlight variations in the spelling of speech-headings, for example, and not just by marking the words but by indicating the letters that differ. I’d like to pay tribute to Ann by looking at another strikingly innovative edition of Hamlet in the same tradition of analytic presentation, one that both builds on and counters the editorial and scholarly trends of its time.
That edition is The Enfolded Hamlet by Bernice Kliman, who fortunately saw it to completion (and indeed to publication in three different forms), and whose death in 2011 came after a long and productive scholarly career. It was originally only intended as one component of a far larger project, still underway – the New Variorum edition of Hamlet that Kliman initiated and directed – but it had its own value and rationale. Though well known among Shakespeareans, its innovations are not much publicized in the wider scholarly world; in the history of textual scholarship more generally, and particularly that of digital scholarly editions, it is a far more important contribution than has been recognized.
In its earliest published form, as a forty-four page special issue of The Shakespeare Newsletter in 1996, The Enfolded Hamlet was designed to show at once both the original-spelling text of Q2 and all significant differences in the First Folio text.2 Q2 material that is different or absent in F1 is marked by curly braces; F1 material is similarly supplied in angle brackets. As an example, for TLN 1233 the edition prints:
Pol. I meane the matter {that} you {reade}<meane,> my Lord.
Only Q2 prints ‘that’ and ‘reade’; only F1 prints ‘meane,’. In this line the spelling and punctuation of the rest of the line happen to be the same in Q2 and F1, but when there is no significant variation what you get is Q2 and no indication of what F1 might be doing. ‘Significant’ variation includes some differences in spelling and punctuation, based on Kliman’s judgment. There is no reference at all to readings in Q1. There are no notes, only a 2,400 word introduction.
This edition does only a few things, not everything. According to Kliman’s introduction, it arose in 1989 as a byproduct of the New Variorum Edition, as a way to solve the problem of choosing one base text as the series required; the enfolded text keeps all the significant variants from Q2 and F1 visible as part of the main text, without requiring a look at the notes. Though it later turned into an online publication, its origins are in the world of scholarly editing for the printed page, with considerations of space and compression always in mind. And it continues the sequence of editions that included Teena Rochfort Smith’s: Smith was not the first editor to create an analytic presentation of textual variation in early Hamlet texts, but hers is certainly one of the most ambitious.
Among scholarly editions of English texts from the 1980s and 1990s, The Enfolded Hamlet is unusual: there are few parallels in its era to the choices it makes. Though there was a continuing tradition of interventionist editing, in such editions as the Oxford Shakespeare, the Northwestern–Newberry edition of Moby-Dick, and Hans Walter Gabler’s edition of Ulysses, the increasing trend in the field was towards non-intervention and attempts at mediation-free transmission. That trend produced a number of editions focused on manuscripts rather than printed versions, such as the Cornell Wordsworth, the Cornell Yeats, and R.W. Franklin’s Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition. In all of these editions, the primary aim is to print complete transcriptions of manuscripts rather than to construct a single text from them. Another approach in this line was the large-scale facsimile edition of manuscripts, as in the numerous series of printed facsimiles published by Garland, of materials by Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, Whitman, Shaw, Joyce, and many others. An editor’s role had once been to select and to reconstruct, building the proper text out of a study of the evidence and with some judicious emendation, and in print presenting a smooth surface backed up by unobtrusive notes. But the taste was increasingly for things not so smoothed out, for preservation of the details in full. Michael Warren’s Complete King Lear, 1608–1623 in 1989, with its facsimiles of the play’s early publications as well as an analytic parallel text, was a significant manifestation of this textual attitude. Teena Rochfort Smith’s edition had a similar ambition of completeness but before facsimiles became so common.
Digital publications in the humanities in that era were also often projects in diplomatic or facsimile reproduction; by the 1990s the practicality of large-scale publication of digital images on CD-ROM led to the idea that an edition might simply publish everything, without mediation, so that readers would be freed from the interfering figure of the editor. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin have shown how, over and over again in the history of publishing, new technology that was obtrusive and hard to use was still seen as offering transparent access without the undesirable mediation of older methods.3 One curious belief about digital editions in the 1990s was that it was not merely good for them to be transparent channels without editorial intervention, it was impossible for them to be anything else. Creators of serious digital editions of the time, such as the Blake Archive, knew very well that these ideas were naive, but the completeness of Warren’s Lear was still the dominant idea.
But The Enfolded Hamlet is not complete, and Kliman’s introductions to its various editions made that very clear. The 1996 publication omitted most F1 spelling and punctuation variants, all Q1 readings, and all press variants. Writing in 2006 about this and other secondary products of the New Variorum Hamlet, Kliman observed ‘Modern marketers try to suggest that every edition has to suit all purposes: general reading, study, scholarship and performance. Our Enfolded edition is in this respect distinctly retrograde: a text for a specific audience – which as it turns out is not as narrow as one would think: relatively little of the text’s peculiarity, compared to modern editions, is unfathomable’.4 Indeed, one common claim in plans for complete digital editions in the 1990s was that they would do everything for everybody and you’d never need to do it again – adapting a claim that used to be made within Fredson Bowers’s sphere of influence about scholarly editions, that the work would be done once and for all if it was really done right. Bowers himself was more judicious than that, and usually said only that fundamental bibliographical research wouldn’t need to be redone; he knew that there were always further possibilities in editing.
Smith’s work would have answered far better to the spirit of the 1990s, in its ambition to provide a complete guide to the textual evidence for Hamlet; Ann Thompson commented on the increased interest in such analytic presentations in the digital era. But Kliman was obviously right about the context, in which there are huge numbers of Hamlet editions constructed on many other principles readily available, and more value in doing something different rather than something total.
Kliman’s Enfolded Hamlet, then, was unusual for its time in offering a view of a selection of evidence, rather than completeness. In another respect, it is very much of its time, in its attention to the effective presentation of that evidence using a newly-developed system. Presentation was a topic that Kliman addressed on other occasions: as in her work on The Three-Text Hamlet, a parallel-text presentation of all three Hamlet sources, or her essay about Charles Jennens, whose neglected editions of Shakespeare plays had new design features intended to assist analysis rather than reading. The Three-Text Hamlet was possible in part because of the rise of desktop publishing in the 1980s: it would have been far more difficult to produce through the traditional sort of collaboration with compositors.
New technology in the 1980s and 1990s tended to be enlisted for works with complex textual situations, and until the late 1990s led to printed books rather than online publications. Most famous is Hans Walter Gabler’s edition of Ulysses, with a ‘synoptic’ presentation showing the later stages of the development of Joyce’s text, as he revised and expanded it through a series of manuscripts, typescripts, and proofs. It manages to describe the symbols and conventions it uses for this in only two pages, and the really crucial symbols are actually only four in number: paired brackets to indicate additions and deletions, with superscripts to indicate the document in which it happened. Some later editions that didn’t need to handle quite as much variation were able to use vertical alignment of variants on the page to do this: that was the approach of J. C. C. Mays in his edition of Coleridge’s poems, and Jesús Tronch-Pérez in his own Q2/F1 edition of Hamlet. The series of Chaucer editions by Peter Robinson and his collaborators has been the most advanced of this kind, with a system for presenting variants from dozens of manuscripts that makes it very clear what’s in each manuscript and how it compares with the rest – it is far easier to work with than the edition of John M. Manly and Edith Rickert from 1940 that had tried to be similarly comprehensive. Robinson’s editions moved into a realm where only digital publication was practical, in view of the vast amount of information that was included.
At first encounter, the editions of Gabler, Mays, Tronch-Pérez, and Robinson look very complex, but their systems are not difficult to learn and are more usable than traditional apparatus notation. Ten to 20 years on, though, few literary scholars are making extensive use of editions of this sort, and one reason is that things in the wider digital world we inhabit have moved in a different direction. That direction is exemplified by the transformation of online library catalogues in the same period. When these first began to be widely available in the 1980s and 1990s, they offered interfaces based on the traditional structure of cataloguing records, with separate searches on author, title, and subject indexes. In the twenty-first century this approach has receded into the background: though it is usually still available, it has been supplanted for most purposes by a Google-style interface in which you don’t bother to choose an index, but just type some words. That minimalism arose from the circumstances of web searching, in which there was very little structured data available, and from the practical discovery that you usually got something about as usable even in searching a library catalogue if you just looked for words and didn’t worry about where they were.
Many areas of computer use, such as engineering, still involve complex software that requires significant effort to learn; the idea persists that editions of literary works ought to have a broader public, though, and by the twenty-first century the usual assumption was that software for the general public should be as simple as possible and require no awareness that one was learning to use it. The restricted interfaces of mobile phones have made simplicity even more imperative, so The Enfolded Hamlet has only looked more and more up-to-date. Kliman published a new version in book form in 2004, which is the only scholarly edition ever published that has a distinctive form of apparatus and manages to explain what all its symbols do within its title: The Enfolded Hamlets: Parallel Texts of <F1> and {Q2} Each With Unique Elements Bracketed. Sadly, though, many library catalogues and citations garble or omit the symbols.
That publication actually represented a drift away from simplicity: it added a version based on F1 and displayed it in parallel with the older Q2-based version, so that it was now possible to see details of F1 spelling and punctuation, but in a larger, more expensive, and more complex book. The (somewhat earlier) online publication was also more complex; it offered the same choice of base text, backed up the symbols with colour highlighting of the variant passages, and included a search interface. It is the 1996 publication that shows the idea of enfolding with the fewest accretions, and with the strongest suggestion that you might read the play in this form, rather than checking a passage here and there. Ron Rosenbaum, in his account of Shakespeare scholarship written for a non-academic audience, describes the initial difficulties even of Kliman’s system for a reader, and also his appreciation of its value for helping him to think about the texts of Hamlet; the apparatus symbols became familiar enough that he could read the enfolded text while keeping both versions in mind at once.5 This simultaneous reading of several versions is only possible when the usual process of consciously decoding the apparatus is overcome: when the symbols are just another kind of punctuation.
Why is The Enfolded Hamlet so successful? One key is that its design is exactly attuned to the textual situation it presents, in which two versions are very close and the great majority of the variants involve a difference within a line, rather than entirely different lines. Though a parallel-text edition is useful, it also leaves much of the work undone, at least in the common form of parallel presentation that The Three-Text Hamlet uses: a reader is left to do the work of finding the variants within lines. The material is also in the same sequence in Q2 and F1, so no provision is needed to indicate the migration of blocks of text. In all of these respects, Q1 would be difficult to integrate into the enfolded text: the level of variation is higher and the order is different.
Because the differences between Q2 and F1 are not enormous, as Shakespeareans have long known, a very minimal apparatus suffices. As Kliman herself pointed out, the approach starts to become a problem in some passages that happen to have greater variation. It is not that the symbols become impossible to understand, but that too much is happening at once and the possibility of simultaneous reading of both versions, as Rosenbaum described it, becomes much less available. When there are two or three variants in a line you can keep them in your head at once; beyond that it starts to be a problem. In my experience, repetition of phrases can also block reading and require a halt to decode the symbols, which are no longer quite so easy to work through. For example, a passage at TLN 3368–9 reads ‘this same skull sir, <this same Scull sir,> was {sir} Yoricks skull’. That is indeed an F1 repetition, and an added ‘sir’ in Q2; the repetition can feel like an error or a variant of the Q2 version, in part because of the change from ‘skull’ to ‘Scull’ as we move from Q2’s spelling to F1’s. F1 actually says ‘Scull’ both times; this is one instance where the mixture of spellings is a distraction from what matters.
These occasional failures of the edition make clear its success most of the time in conveying an idea of both versions at once: and it’s the compression that makes this work. The Three-Text Hamlet and other editions that pursue completeness make a great deal of information available, but they are best for textual analysis and construction, and not extensive reading. Another feature of The Enfolded Hamlet that supports reading is the avoidance of the kind of font changes that Teena Rochfort Smith used – because it is difficult for readers to avoid seeing font and colour changes as indicating emphasis. The most familiar instance of this problem is the King James Bible’s use of italics: though italicized words are usually ones added by the translators, modern readers are often heard trying to emphasize these insignificant words. It’s true, though, that the online version of The Enfolded Hamlet does use colour as well as symbols: in the 1990s this was an almost obligatory feature of web pages.
Since then, attention in Shakespearean circles to the multiple versions of works like Hamlet has only grown, and editions such as Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor’s give even Q1 a new prominence. Their decision to treat the three texts as independent is a step beyond the work of editors who focused on juxtaposing and comparing them, from Teena Rochfort Smith and other nineteenth-century scholars through to Bernice Kliman. But Kliman when comparing Hamlets was already thinking about the distinctive value of each version. She wrote appreciatively of the differences in pace, tone, delivery, characterization, and philosophy that Q2/F1 variants suggested; she only conceded with evident reluctance that sometimes one or the other was just wrong. This, of course, is the final way in which her edition is characteristic of its age: it sees the multiplication of versions as multiplying possibilities for readers and performers, rather than needing reduction to one text.
Notes
1‘Teena Rochfort Smith, Frederick Furnivall, and the New Shakspere Society’s Four-Text Edition of Hamlet’, Shakespeare Quarterly 49 (1998), 125–39. Photographs of the Folger Shakespeare Library copy of Smith’s edition are online at: http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/dg3447
2Shakespeare Newsletter 46, extra issue (1996).
3‘Remediation’, Configurations 4 (1996), 311–58.
4‘Print and Electronic Editions Inspired by the New Variorum Hamlet Project’, Shakespeare Survey 59 (2006), 157–67.
5The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups (New York, 2006), pp. 86–90, 96–8.