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“Ink and Paper”: A Study on the English Editions and the Italian Translations of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra • Valentina Rossi
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1. The English Editions of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1623–1765)

1. The English Editions of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1623–1765)

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The starting point of the present investigation is the text that Michael Ridley (Shakespeare, 1954: VII) defined as “the only authoritative” version of Antony and Cleopatra, that is, the one contained in the so-called First Folio.1 In the manuscript edited by John Heminge and Henry Condell, the Roman play is included in the catalogue with the title of Antony and Cleopater, in the section labelled as ‘Tragedies,’ and it is positioned between Othello, the Moore of Venice and Cymbeline, King of Britain.

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The play comprises 29 pages. By opening the first one, the title is different from the one listed in the catalogue: as a matter of fact, we have THE TRAGEDIE OF / Anthonie, and Cleopatra, followed by a banner that bears the writing “Actus Primus. Scœna Prima.” The reference is noteworthy, given that there are no other act/scene divisions in the play.2 Overwhelmingly, the text is easy to read, and the stylistic choices are applied straightforwardly (see Baldini, 1962: 5). Nevertheless, according to Howard-Hill (1977: 7; see also Shakespeare, 1995: 78–79), the writing does record some inconsistencies in the use of punctuation. Such an irregularity may be due to the fact that the transcription of the lines was carried out by two different compositors, B and E.

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The First Folio was reprinted in 1632, 1664 and 1685. Although Samuel Johnson (1821: 145) considered only the 1632 edition to be “not without value,” considering the other two “little better than waste paper,” contemporary critics have remarked on the propriety of the modernisation of the page layout and graphic rendering proposed in them (see, among others, Braunmuller, 2003).3

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The text contained in the collection that inaugurates the following century, that is The Works of Mr. William Shakespear, published by Tonson and edited by the poet and playwright Nicholas Rowe in 1709, presents some significant alterations when compared with the Folios, as argued by Hamm (2004: 179–180):
 

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The Works of Mr. William Shakespear marks a major departure from the folio collections of the previous century. Rowe makes many corrections and improvements to the text of his predecessors: he attempts to normalise spelling, punctuation, and grammar; he clarifies many of the plays’ act and scene divisions; he adds robust stage directions, marking localities as well as characters’ entrances and exits; he includes a list of dramatis personae for each of the plays; and he translates the folio’s Latin headings to English. Rowe’s Shakespear also makes numerous innovations in its treatment of the text: it contains a “life” or biographical account of Shakespeare composed by Rowe; it includes plates depicting scenes from the plays […]; it employs a new page layout that resets the folio’s cramped, double-columned text; and it dispenses with the large folio volume, instead portioning out the forty-three plays included in the 1685 edition over six octavo volumes or 3,324 pages […]. [C]ritics have regarded Rowe’s edition as a watershed moment in publishing history, one that marks the beginning of the modern Shakespeare text […]. This reputation continues today. […] Rowe’s Shakespear undoubtedly marks a radical break from the seventeenth-century’s Shakespeare.
 

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The publication of the Works aimed to legitimise Shakespeare’s reputation in England, with several editions devoted to the repertoire of “the quintessential English author, the first among the English moderns” (Hamm, 2004: 193) printed in the eighteenth century, such as:

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  • THE WORKS OF SHAKESPEAR IN SIX VOLUMES COLLATED AND CORRECTED BY THE FORMER EDITIONS, BY MR. POPE: edited by Alexander Pope in 1725, with an introduction, footnotes and “an elaborate set of typographical symbols to mark what he saw as the ‘Beauties’ and ‘Faults’ in Shakespeare’s plays” (King, 2008: 3);4
  • THE WORKS OF SHAKESPEARE: a critical edition published in 1733 by Lewis Theobald, an English writer who filled the pages with several footnotes to inform the readers about some personal reflections concerning those cases when two or more translations or interpretations of a term were possible, analogies or references to other Elizabethan works, historical or religious events that were mentioned in the text;5
  • THE PLAYS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: IN TWENTY-ONE VOLUMES, WITH THE CORRECTIONS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF VARIOUS COMMENTATORS, TO WHICH ARE ADDED NOTES: considered by the critics the first “variorium Shakespeare” (Ritchie & Sabor, 2012: 353) edited by Samuel Johnson in 1765, who nonetheless showed “less regard” for Antony and Cleopatra mainly due to the excessively vulgar language of some characters.6
1 The references to the ‘historical’ English editions are drawn from the Internet Shakespeare Editions. http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca (2023. 07. 23).
2 Concerning this last point, it is worth remarking that The New Oxford Shakespeare editors “[attempted] to distinguish between act intervals that have the authority of early performance and those that were merely mechanically inserted (with little regard for artistic effect) for print publication” (Shakespeare, 2017b: ixx). Consequently, they opted for a “scene-only counting” (Shakespeare, 2017b: xx) for Antony and Cleopatra, dividing the text of the tragedy into 43 scenes: no other Shakespearian play has a larger number.
3 To provide some examples: the title is modernised in THE / TRAGEDY / OF / ANTHONY and CLEOPATRA – with a “y” in “tragedy” and a different spelling for the male protagonist’s name; the consonant “v” is not indicated with the vowel “u” – as the line (F1) “new Heauen, new Earth” = (F3) “New Heaven, new Earth” demonstrates; we do not find the silent “e” at the end of words, such as in (F1) Egypte = (F3) Egypt or (F1) Queene = (F3) Queen; corrections of typos and other improvements are made. For instance, on page 342 of F1, Mark Antony and Enobarbus exit the scene, but we find no “Exeunt”: the stage direction is added in F2; on page 344 of F1, Cleopatra’s chamber lady’s name is misspelt as “Chiarmion;” the typo is emended in F2.
4 Pope’s pioneering edition was poorly judged by Samuel Johnson (1765: 103), who disclosed his malcontent in the Preface of his edition by asserting that “the compleat explanation of an author not systematick and consequential, but desultory and vagrant, abounding in casual and light hints, is not to be expected from any single scholiast”. Over time, critics ended up sharing such a position, in the conviction that Pope had exerted “the most unwarrantable liberty” (Lounsbury, 1906: 94) when intervening on the Shakespearian texts. On the matter, see also Warren (1929), Butt (1936) and Dixon (1964).
5 According to Dick (Theobald, 1949: 1), Theobald’s edition was “the first edition of an English writer in which a man with a professional breadth and concentration of reading in the writer’s period tried to bring all relevant, ascertainable fact to bear on the establishment of the author’s text and the explication of his obscurities. For Theobald was the first editor of Shakespeare who displayed a well grounded knowledge of Shakespeare’s language and metrical practice and that of his contemporaries, the sources and chronology of his plays, and the broad range of Elizabethan-Jacobean drama as a means of illuminating the work of the master writer.” About the relevance of Theobald’s editorial activity, see also Jones (1966) and Smith (1928); a selection of his amendments on the text of Antony and Cleopatra are illustrated in Erne (2016: 66–67).
6 For instance, concerning the line “Triple-turned whore!” (4.12.13), that is, the reproach that Mark Antony utters towards Cleopatra after he lost the Battle of Actium, Johnson wrote: “Shall I mention what had dropped into imagination, that our author might perhaps have written ‘triple-tongued’? ‘Double-tongued’ is a common term of reproach, which rage might improve to ‘triple-tongued’” (as quoted in Payne, 1990: 71). If not indicated otherwise, all quotes from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra are drawn from the 1995 Arden edition by Wilders. The line numbers are provided in parentheses after quotes in the text.
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