Shakespeare | Cut: Rethinking cutwork in an age of distraction by Smith Bruce R.;

Author:Smith, Bruce R.; [Smith, Bruce R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780198735526
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2016-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

Paraphs were used in pen-and-ink technology (we observed in Chapter 2 how horizontal lines separate speech-cuts in the manuscript Book of Sir Thomas More), but they came into greater prominence in print, first as a graphic and then as an indention taking the place of the sign. The inverted commas in the 1676 quarto of Hamlet (see Figure 7A) and in Pope’s 1725 edition of Shakespeare’s plays (see Figure 7B) function as paraphs, as do the horizontal lines that Pope used to relegate unworthy lines and passages in Shakespeare’s text to the bottom of the page. All forms of paraphs are cuts.

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“Cool” media and “hot” media: Marshall McLuhan’s distinction in Understanding Media (1964) is interesting to think about in connection with pen-and-ink technology versus print. McLuhan’s distinction is made according to how much participation a particular medium invites on the part of the perceiver: “Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than a dialogue” (McLuhan 1964: 25). McLuhan regards printed books as a hot medium, and I would agree. A playhouse manuscript in the form of the “book” of the play or an actor’s “side” requires much more participation than a printed text does. In the “cooler” medium of manuscript it is the writer and the user, not a typesetter, who does the cutting.

Nerissa’s pen-and-ink cut of the trial scene in Merchant was enacted whenever an early modern reader chose to write down extracts from Shakespeare’s texts. In transcribing cuts from Shakespeare’s printed texts into their own manuscript “tables,” they were, in McLuhan’s terms, moving Shakespeare’s words from a hot medium into a cool one. Or, rather, back again. All of the verbal cuts from Shakespeare that occur in surviving manuscript miscellanies of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries come from printed sources: Venus and Adonis (1593), The Rape of Lucrece (1594), and sonnets published in the anthology The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), including versions of three sonnets written by the suitors in Act 4, Scenes 2 and 3, of Love’s Labour’s Lost. But extracts from fourteen of Shakespeare’s plays also figure in these collections (Beale 1980–3: 1:452ff), and they too come from printed texts. An example is Edmund Pudsey’s manuscript book datable to 1609–12 (now Bodleian MS Eng. poet.d.3 and Shakespeare Birthplace Trust ER 82/1/21) containing pen-and-ink cuts from six Shakespeare plays, many of them altered slightly from the quarto texts. Hamlet gets the most sustained attention, but Pudsey writes out five one- and two-line speech-cuts from The Merchant of Venice and sorts them into passions (“austere,” “peevish”), rhetorical occasions (“protests”), topics (“laws”), and figures of speech (“simile”) (Savage 1887 unpaginated).

Line-cuts and speech-cuts dominate Shakespeare cuts in manuscripts, but there is one famous instance in which a penman has added character-cuts in the form of costumed figures. A single manuscript sheet with an inscribed date of 1595 (Marquess of Bath, Harley Papers, vol. 1, fol. 159v, Foakes 1985: no. 25)

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