Virtual Grub Street: William J. Rolfe vs. the Orthodoxy on Shakespeare’s Pericles.

The better pre-Authorship Shakespeare scholars were refreshingly willing to call ‘em as they saw ‘em when their findings conflicted with the ensconced traditions in the field. At the same time, all but a very few tended not to contextualize those findings as challenges to the prevailing orthodoxy.

Finding confirmation of such conflicts can be a particularly powerful tool in the Authorship Debate. By “pre-Authorship” scholarship, I refer to work that required as an absolute prerequisite authorship by the Stratford man because there seemed to be so complete a consensus that it simply had to be correct. The prima facia evidence of the Stratford Monument and Ben Jonson’s front matter to the First Folio was beyond rebuttal. All chronologies, biographies, etc. were required to begin from the sacred assumption that the Stratford man wrote the works. Thus all such compilations seemed themselves to be powerful supporting evidence rather than researches interpreted through the absolute precondition that all findings must be made to support the Stratford hypothesis or be wrong.

William J. Rolfe was surprisingly knowledgeable and clearheaded about the text of Shakespeare’s plays for all he was required to censor it from time to time for his high school edition of the complete plays. In the Introduction to his edition of the problematical play Pericles we find the following astonishing assertion:

There are two different solutions of these contradictory phenomena, and it is not easy to decide, with confidence, which is the true one. The first hypothesis is founded upon the old traditionary opinion, that Pericles, in its original form, was one of the author's earliest dramatic essays, perhaps an almost boyish work; but that not long before 1609, when it was printed as a " late much-admired play," the author, then in the meridian of his reputation, revised and enlarged it, as he had repeatedly done with others of his plays, which, like Romeo and Juliet, Love's Labour 's Lost, etc., are announced in their title-pages as having been "newly corrected, augmented, and amended." This hypothesis, of course, rejects the favourite notion that Shakespeare's genius burst forth at once in its full splendour and magnitude, and takes for granted, what all experience teaches, that the first trials of his strength had the awkwardness and feebleness of boyish youth.[1]

Just where Rolfe found the “traditionary opinion” I cannot say, but, by well before 1898, the idea of a young Shakespeare rewriting plays from a much earlier period of apprenticeship was strictly verboten. Rolfe himself will feel, some three years later, when he published his obligatory traditional life of Shakespeare[2], the need to abandon this position for that of the orthodoxy. The young Shakespeare is replaced by explanations so vague as to do nothing but to avoid conflict without being positively untruthful to the reader.

For the moment, however, Rolfe has followed the evidence, and, as a result, has momentarily broken free of the shackles of orthodoxy. Nor does it stop with Pericles:

[This hypothesis] agrees, too, with the large stage-direction and ample allowance of dumb show, such as he afterwards introduced into his mimic play in Hamlet, and as remain in Cymbeline as remnants of the old groundwork of that drama, and which were strongly characteristic of the fashion of the stage in Shakespeare's youth.[3]

He understands. The many earlier plays (or, at least, most of them) by lesser playwrights rewritten by Shakespeare were his own productions of various stages of the apprenticeship that arrived at the plays of Shakespeare. He was the earlier author. Rolfe took no account of the orthodox “fact” that “those” playwrights wrote in so early a style that they could not have been the Stratford man.

For a brief magical moment, circa 1898, he has glimpsed a truth beyond his time.

the re-examination of his own boyish, half-formed thoughts would naturally expand and elevate them into nobler forms, and reclothe them in that glowing language he had since created for himself.

Yes, indeed. But surely Rolfe recognized that the earlier acts of Pericles being written in prose — in an outdated vocabulary — powerfully implies a composition date for those acts circa 1580. That dumb shows imply a date for the originals for Pericles and Cymbeline between the 1550s and 1585.[4] Presumably, this was the stuff for him of cognitive dissonance.

While the older plays that were the basis of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida[5], and a number of others, all were written by the younger Shakespeare, the older portion of Pericles is less certainly so. One of the most curious results of a positive determination, however, is that we have examples of the young Shakespeare imitating the iambic tetrameter couplets of the poet Gower — one source of the tale of Pericles.

ACT I.

Enter Gower.

Before the Palace of Antioch.

To sing a song that old was sung,

From ashes auntient Gower is come,

Assuming man's infirmities,

To glad your eare and please your eyes.

It hath been sung at feastivals,

On ember-eues and Holydayes:

And lords and ladyes in their liues

Have red it for restoratives:

The purchase is to make men glorious;

Et bonum quo antiquius, eo melius.

If you, borne in those latter times,

When witts more ripe, accept my rimes.

And that to hear an old man sing

May to your wishes pleasure bring,

I life would wish, and that I might

Waste it for you, like Taper light.

The lines are end-stopped and the rhymes almost always masculine as is the case in Gower’s poems. By Act IV, Sc. 3, when Shakespeare’s part in the play is said to begin, Gower is speaking his prologue in iambic pentameter couplets, again almost entirely end-stopped and masculine. Gower’s prologue to Act V. is written in iambic pentameter a,b,a,b quatrains and liberally employs run on lines and feminine endings. It is recognizably written by a master. In short we seem to see the poet maturing from a young man with a knack for verse imitation into the craftsman we know as Shakespeare.

[1] Shakespeare's History of Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1898). Rolfe ed. 21-2.

[2] Rolfe, William J. A Life of William Shakespeare (1904)

[3] Ibid., 22.

[4] Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare’s Hamlet include a repurposing of the outdated dumbshow which may have been momentarily in style a few years later.

[5] See my variorum edition of Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584) as the old play rewritten and expanded into Troilus and Cressida. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JD7KM1T