English Professor's Scholarship Unveils the Surprises of Shakespeare

By Leigh DuPuy

Students of Shakespeare can often be seen lugging The Riverside Shakespeare, a comprehensive volume containing the full canon of plays and poetry that is a requisite in any classroom studying the great Bard. However, the familiar tome will now become altered, full of surprises, due to the scholarship of English professor John Tobin.

Tobin is the general editor of a new series of Shakespearean texts from The Riverside Shakespeare, which is published by Houghton Mifflin. "These texts are a much friendlier size," says Tobin of the individual paperbacks, each of which focuses on one play. The paperbacks will boast new introductions that contain more recent scholarship concerning the life of Shakespeare, the sources for his plays, the texts themselves, and the physical theater in which they were performed.

Tobin relates these new volumes to our familiarity with the play Hamlet. When viewers go to see a performance of the famed play, "it's like seeing an old friend, but we also want to be surprised by a new twist, tone, or focus. There is a balance between seeing what we know and seeing a fresh new handling," he explains.

What could possibly be new in works by a 17th century playwright? might ask one unschooled in Shakespeare. Plenty. "There are always new pieces of information that come to light," says Tobin, an expert on the sources of Shakespeare's plays.

Such information helps to address some of the plays' mysteries. Because of the collaborative nature of the world of theater, many different versions of the same play exist. Tobin points out that Shakespeare himself never supervised the printing of his plays and errors crept in during their production. So how do scholars decide which of the multiple texts best reflects authorial intention?

Tobin examines the sources Shakespeare frequently used to try and determine which was the author's original intent. "Shakespeare always started with someone else's storyline and spliced versions from other books," Tobin says. "If we can match one of his words with that of a word in one of his sources, such as the plays by Thomas Nash, then we prefer this particular version."

These comparisons help the reader better understand characters and themes, and resolve textual ambiguities, says Tobin. They are also useful in establishing a play's chronology. These sources and discoveries are included with each new edition.

Tobin has also been researching aspects of the physical theater where Shakespearean plays were performed. While the plays were performed in a lot of different places in Shakespeare's day, including the great halls, dining rooms, inns, courts, law school, and guild towns, the most well-known venue is the Globe amphitheatre, a three-level public theater with no roof.

"The amphitheatre was a gathering place of all society and offered a full spectrum of social class and genders," explains Tobin. New information about the amphitheatres has revealed that the stage may have been raked, or inclined, which would have provided a much better angle to view the action for those with the "cheap" seats, right by the stage's edge. It would have also enhanced stage action in the plays themselves.

Another recent discovery also includes the true diameter of the amphitheatres. The 100-foot diameter of the New Globe, a reproduction of the original amphitheatre, negatively impacts the venue's acoustics. "A recent investigation using radar of the Globe's original foundation, as well as others, found that the original and its other neighbor theatres were 72 feet across," says Tobin, which means that the acoustics for the original audiences did not have these flaws.

Tobin can't suppress his excitement over these new discoveries. He says, "Shakespeare scholarship is the perfect blend of the known and the loved familiar with the surprisingly new. We, in 2003, are still bringing new elements which affect our understanding of what's on the page and on the stage."

The volumes will also include research by editors that examines Shakespeare's relationship to Catholicism and the use of stylometrics to determine authorship of plays suspected to be Shakespeare's.

In the summer of 2004, the first six volumes will be published: Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Richard III, The Tempest, and Macbeth. Tobin and his colleagues will then work on the next six plays for the new series.

"Shakespeare will always be Shakespeare," says Tobin. "It's just now we're seeing how special he is."

Image: Professor John Tobin of the English Department is editing a new series of Shakespearean plays for Houghton Mifflin. (Photo by Harry Brett)

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