A new book by 91快播 Fellow Ted Tregear explores how William Shakespeare appealed to the reading habits of his contemporaries 鈥 including those who compiled anthologies from extracts of his writing.
takes its lead from a group of five anthologies published between 1599 and 1601, halfway through Shakespeare鈥檚 career, which featured excerpts from his poems and plays. Expanding on his PhD, Ted asks whether Shakespeare anticipated being read like this, in extracted and anthologized passages鈥攁nd whether that changes how we read his works.
鈥淚 was asking, how do these anthologies help us read the plays differently?鈥 Ted says.
鈥淗ow do they guide us towards the most anthologizable passages, passages which Shakespeare might have put there to be anthologized?
鈥淭hey are moments where Shakespeare is inviting readers to take extracts from his works, but asking them to reflect on what they鈥檙e doing. And by doing this, he鈥檚 leading them into the central questions of his poems and plays.鈥
Ted describes the book as 鈥渞eally an excuse to get closer to the texts themselves鈥. Anthologizing Shakespeare offers detailed readings of poems and plays from Shakespeare鈥檚 first decade in print. One of those plays is Hamlet, a tragedy written at around the time Shakespeare was being most heavily anthologized.
鈥淚n some ways, Hamlet very obviously shows the traces of those anthologies,鈥 Ted adds. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a play that is obsessed with quoting and commonplacing and anthologizing, and abounds in precepts and maxims and sententiae that you can take out of context and re-use in other situations.
鈥淲丑别苍 Hamlet was first printed in 1603, it was printed with quotation-marks in the margins next to certain speeches. Those are telling early readers: 鈥榯hese are the lines you take from this鈥, 鈥榞et your pen out and write these down in your commonplace book鈥. From the beginning, when readers encountered Hamlet, they encountered a play that was offering them up material for commonplacing.
鈥淭he difficulty is a lot of those commonplaces are spoken by characters we think of as, at best, tangential to the action鈥攁nd at worst, as idiots. Characters like Polonius. Polonius always loves dispensing these maxims of advice. So we鈥檝e got this contradiction: how is it that a play is packaging, as authoritative words of wisdom, lines that any good reader should approach with caution?
鈥淭hat contradiction is what drew me to write about the play. But the more I worked on it, the more I discovered this whole rich domain of tragic poetics and tragic theory behind these sententiae.
鈥淔rom Aristotle onwards, good tragedies are thought to contain a certain element of thought: what Aristotle calls dianoia, and what his Latin translators call sententia. So in including sententiae like this Shakespeare isn鈥檛 just drawing on the contemporary energies of the anthologies themselves, he鈥檚 tapping into a longer tradition about the relationship between thought and drama.鈥
The analysis led Ted to consider a question at the heart of Hamlet 鈥 how thinking can be put onstage. He compares the different ways its characters think: whether that鈥檚 Polonius, who offers easily extractable sententiae, or Hamlet, who obsessively gestures towards 鈥渢hat within鈥, but can鈥檛 seem to say what he means.
Rather than be daunted by finding a new strand of researching Shakespeare, Ted was encouraged by the opportunity.
Ted, who is now researching the relationship between philosophy and literature in the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets, adds: 鈥淎lthough you can sometimes feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of what鈥檚 there, there鈥檚 also a freedom in that.
鈥淎 lot of what I was doing was bringing together areas of research that hadn鈥檛 really been talking to one another. It鈥檚 in a sense an invitation to be creative and pick your own way through a crowded field.鈥
