Shakespeare Globe

Volumes that I prize

In Volumes that I prize scholars, teachers and theatre artisits select books about Shakespeare that have inspired and informed their approach to reading, teaching and/or interpreting plays.

The Globe's Book of the Season, this season, is Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (OUP, 2007). Gary Taylor (Florida State University), a general editor of The Collected Works discusses his choices in conversation with Gwilym Jones, the senior research intern working in the Globe Education department.

Gary Taylor

‘The resources that I use most often’, Taylor says, ‘are ones that scholars use. The book that I use most often is the OED – and that’s the online version, not the book. If this were a list of the resources that I most prize, it would comprise of online sites of dictionaries and reference works.' Such a list, from a scholar who has been so intimately involved in the Oxford editions of the complete Shakespeare and the complete Middleton, would be fascinating. However, that is not the focus for this article. Taylor states his intention to choose ‘books that actually would appeal to people who are fond of Shakespeare and which will offer them experiences which, in some ways will be in the same league.’ He would like his list to represent ‘ideal cultural accompaniments that aren’t going to be dwarfed by Shakespeare – including looking at the best art of England at the time and listening to its music.’ His discomfort is tangible, '... of course it’s impossible to pick ten.’ But pick ten he must.

Taylor's first book is the Bible. ‘in order to understand Shakespeare, the one book that most influenced him was clearly the Bible and it’s hard to understand him without it.’ ‘Of course’, he laughs, ‘there are lots of editions. As an editor and translator, I’m very interested not just in the question of which book, but which edition of which book.’ He begins his description of the various editions by speaking about an old out of print book (called the Hexapla) which is an edition of six different early modern translations of the Bible, all on one page for convenient comparison. ‘It’s only the New Testament,’ he explains, ‘but even then it’s big and unwieldy to use. If people are really interested in all of the multiple translations, you can now get those online.’ And if he had to pick one edition, would it be the Geneva version, the one that Shakespeare knew? ‘Yes, the Geneva’, he replies. ‘There is a facsimile edition, but it’s actually much more readable online. The one that’s most accessible, of course, is the King James, and that’s not too far off, but it’s not the one that Shakespeare was reading.’ Although the various editions are not always of crucial importance. ‘To note whether a certain passage is in one translation, you must pay attention to tiny verbal variants. But the real influence on his mind and his art is not specific, I think, to a particular translation. It’s a pervasive influence: it’s the book of his world, in all sorts of ways.’

His next choice is Ovid’s Metamorphoses. ‘There’s a modern edition of the Golding translation [that Shakespeare read] which is easily available and fairly cheap. Of course, Shakespeare would have read it in Latin as well – it’s quite evident. For me the important thing is Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which seems to me the single poetic text which had the most influence on him. If you want to understand Shakespeare, you have to know those books.’

Not every writer is translated or published as widely as Ovid, however. The third writer on Taylor’s list is Plutarch, now most widely known for his association with Shakespeare, particularly as a source for the Roman plays, with his Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans. ‘Thomas North’s translation is the one that Shakespeare knew. There are lots of places where you can get excerpts from some of the lives that Shakespeare used – or you maybe even get the whole life of Antony or Julius Caesar or whoever. But of course, Shakespeare didn’t just read the excerpts, and he didn’t just read the lives he wanted dramatising.’ Even a cursory look at Plutarch’s rendering of the life of Julius Caesar will confirm why the Roman writer survives most often in excerpts: Shakespeare takes as direct source material only the last few pages of a comparatively lengthy text. As Taylor makes clear, however, the direct source material is not the point. ‘It seems to me that that book had an enormous influence on his way of thinking about politics, which is an essentially biographical way that has to do with great men. It influenced his thinking about politics more than any other book.’

It is apparent that Taylor values the writing for its own sake , but between each choice, he is keen to reinforce the point. He has chosen works ‘not just for their relevance to Shakespeare, but on whether I think they’re good books anyway.’ His next choice is Erasmus, registering excitement at the Toronto edition in progress of the Complete Works. And if it were just one of Erasmus’ works? ‘If you were to pick one, it would be a tough choice between Praise of Folly and the Adages.’ The essayist and philosopher is the first renaissance figure to appear on Taylor’s list. Why Erasmus? ‘He is a great writer and thinker. Praise of Folly has a lot to do with Shakespeare’s notion of comedy and of wisdom, also, so if you were just to pick one work of Erasmus, it would be that one.’

Like Plutarch, Plautus is now most familiar as a source for Shakespeare’s comedies. Consequently, the most well-known of his plays is the Menaechmi, from which Shakespeare took material for Comedy of Errors. Even the Amphitruo, which is also used for that play, is now largely unread. Such selective reading has taken its toll on the rest of the Roman’s plays. ‘There isn’t a book which has good translations of all of the comedies of Plautus. It’s possible to buy all of Plautus in one book, but quite hard to find.’ And so what would be a good place to start? ‘There’s a good volume of four Plautus plays, translated by Eric Segal, including the Menaechmi. Again, the impact of Plautus on Shakespeare is much greater than the two plays that influenced Comedy of Errors. Of all the ancient dramatists, it seems to me that Plautus is the one that most influenced him and his notions of comedy and dramatic structure – everything about playwriting, in fact.’

‘There’s a value’, says Taylor, ‘in translations that come from the same time period.’ This is the thinking behind his choice of edition for the next writer, Montaigne. The French thinker exerted a powerful influenced over Shakespeare in the latter part of the playwright’s career. ‘It should be John Florio’s translation, which Shakespeare would have certainly read. Florio is an interesting Elizabethan writer too, so it’s a combination of important writers for Shakespeare.’ Is it a helpful translation for the modern reader? ‘Reading Montaigne to be reading Montaigne’, replies Taylor, ‘I wouldn’t necessarily choose Florio, but coming to Montaigne because of my interest in Shakespeare, it would be the one to read.’

It is clear that a great deal of reasoning has informed the next name on the list, Philip Sidney. ‘I thought about Petrarch,’ Taylor explains, ‘who again is a great writer, but if you’re going to have to pick out one exemplar of that tradition for people interested in Shakespeare, it has to be Sidney.’ It is, indeed, hard to deny the English writer’s influence over his contemporaries and successors. Is there a particular edition to seek out? ‘Either in the 1590s edition or, more likely, Katherine Duncan-Jones’ Selected Works. The important thing is it has to include the Arcadia as well as the sonnets. Those are wonderful writings.’ And astonishingly varied too – the Arcadia is one of the finest examples of early modern prose storytelling, whereas Astrophil and Stella contains sonnets of extraordinary lyrical intensity. Taylor explains his choice: ‘my own sense is that they represent Shakespeare’s Tudor inheritance, not just for him, but for his generation. They’re a summation of what it meant to be a great English writer, far more than Spenser, I think.’ Perhaps wary of a follow-up question, Taylor pre-empts: ‘I don’t want to choose between Arcadia and Astrophil and Stella, I just want to say Works.’

For the remainder of his choices, Taylor moves away from writers that influenced Shakespeare. His next item is a stalwart text of theatre history, Stanley Wells’ Anthology of Criticism. ‘For me’, he explains ‘it’s the best single book on the stage history of Shakespeare’s works. It’s not just that they’re eyewitness accounts of performances, but that they are all great writers.’ Taylor chuckles briefly as says ‘maybe not in the same category as Erasmus, Ovid… but they’re nevertheless good writers and any book that I’m going to treasure will be one that I think the writing is worth reading, quite apart from its relevance to Shakespeare.’

Despite the lengthy discussion of great writers, Taylor is equally keen to remind us that Shakespeare’s world is also visual. For this reason, his next choice is Roy Strong’s edition of Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, in two volumes. ‘This is the best single collection I know of the visual art of his time. There are greater artists in Europe at the time, but their works didn’t travel. For a sense of the visual world that surrounded Shakespeare, it would have to be English painting and particularly portraits, because that’s what Shakespeare does – he’s not a landscape artist as much as he’s interested in human portraiture. The nice feature about the Strong edition is that it’s almost exclusively pictures.’

Moving swiftly from the eye to the ear, Taylor remembers that Shakespeare’s is also an oral world. Quite logically, the most attractive feature of his final choice is not the book itself. ‘I’m interested’, he explains, ‘in text technologies in a much wider sense than just books. A major reason for choosing Ross Duffin’s Shakespeare’s Songbook over various other books on Shakespeare and music is that, as a very recent book, it comes with a CD. You can actually listen to the music, which makes an enormous difference.’ What are the other books on music worth considering? Taylor mentions Bruce R. Smith’s The Acoustic World of Early Modern England – ‘a wonderful book and very sophisticated, and intellectually thrilling’ – but is adamant that being able to hear the music itself is the crucial thing. He speaks passionately about Middleton’s music, only half chuckling when he notes that ‘the CD is not available yet’. His speech quickens with a clear excitement when he talks of his desire to organise a concert of Middleton’s songs springs from the fact that ‘most of the major Elizabethan and Jacobean composers are represented. It’s a sufficiently large body of actual original scores.’

‘So, that’s ten’, he says, with an undeniable tenor of resignation that he couldn’t pick at least a few dozen more. He intimates another list he had had in mind, one comprised exclusively of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. I can’t help wondering whether his reasons for deciding against such a choice are based on simple modesty: the Oxford Middleton would, of course, have to be included. Taylor is certainly uncomfortable with the idea that he is sometimes perceived as the sole editor of those volumes. ‘The truth is’, he says ‘I have learned much more over the past few years from the 74 other contributors to the Middleton project, and leaving aside my own small contribution, they have changed my thinking about Shakespeare more than any other book I have looked at in the past ten years.’

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