Talking Books with Michael Hattaway in 2008

In tribute to Dr. Michael Hattaway, who passed on July 7, 2021, we have reprinted Michael P. Jensen’s “Talking Books” interview with him, originally published in Volume 57, Issue 3 (Winter 2007/2008).

Michael Hattaway wears so many scholarly hats that he needs two hat racks. As a textual editor, his books include the three Henry VI plays and As You Like It (Cambridge University Press, 1990, 1991, 1993, and 2000). His edition of Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle was a New Mermaid book in 1968, revised edition with a new introduction in 2003. Ben Jonson’s The New Inn is available from the Revels Plays (University of Manchester, 1984).

Hattaway also edits readers. A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture (Basil Blackwell, 2000) is a huge book covering every aspect of the literature that I can imagine, and has chapters on cultural contexts such as rhetoric and race, to name just two. There are also two Cambridge Companions. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays (2003) takes an contextual overview then looks at all eleven of Shakespeare’s history plays—eleven because Edward III is boldly grouped with the first tetralogy. There are also glances at the plays with historical Roman and English characters from other genres, such as Coriolanus and King Lear. Most of the contributors to The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama (edited with A. R. Braunmiller, 2e, 2003) do a fine job of considering the work of Marlowe, Dekker, Jonson, the Heywoods, and others, without neglecting Shakespeare. They contextualize the culture for which early modern drama was written.

Renaissance and Reformations: An Introduction to Early Modern English Literature is a monograph that explains how early mod writers constructed their present and their history, described people and places, explored godliness, and considers the process that words took to get from writers to audiences (Basil Blackwell, 2005).

Hattaway referees the Hamlet volume in the excellent “The Critics Debate” series, which studies critical approaches and issues in the play through most of the twentieth-century. The book thrives on the instability of the Hamlet texts, finding in them a metaphor for the dozens of Hamlets in different critical approaches (Macmillan, 1987).

In addition, he has done impressive work as a performance critic. Elizabethan Popular Theatre: Plays in Performance (Routledge, Kegan, & Paul, 1983) is a primer on how plays were put on in early modern England, culminating in a close look at five plays of the era. Hattaway’s Shakespeare editions all include performance histories, and so does Shakespeare in the New Europe, which he co-edited with Boika Sokolova and Derek Roper for Sheffield Academic Press (1995). The book looks at the crosscurrents between Eastern Europe and Shakespeare since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Hattaway’s essay surveys performances of Shakespeare’s history plays in Britain since World War II, looking at several things including what is gained and lost when the plays are produced as cycles. He has written two interesting film articles. His essay in Shakespeare and the Twentieth Century (Jonathan Bate, Jill L. Levenson, and Dieter Mehl, eds., University of Delaware Press, 1998) blisters Kenneth Branagh’s film Much Ado About Nothing (1993) by showing how it misses Shakespeare’s subtext. Hattaway looks at films made from Shakespeare’s comedies in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film (Russell Jackson, ed., 2e, 2007), and considers reasons it is so difficult to translate the comedies into film. These are very sophisticated pieces of film criticism.

Mick Hattaway is emeritus at the University of Sheffield, and currently teaches for James Madison University and New York University in London. This interview was delayed as he tiptoed through the Folger working on new and enlarged editions of As You Like It and the Blackwell Companion to Literature and Culture, as well as a monograph on the way Renaissance dramatists use language to define their culture. He lives in Berkshire where his free time is spent picking-up the hats that overflow those racks.

MPJ: I learned more about As You Like It from your introduction than from any other source not written by Shakespeare, or in a curious way, Thomas Lodge. Who informed your ideas about the play?

MH:  When I was an undergraduate in Wellington, New Zealand I spent far too much of my time acting and then, while a postgrad at Cambridge, suffered a kind of revulsion against that sort of thing.  It was being invited to teach at the University of Birmingham Shakespeare Summer School in Stratford-upon-Avon by a wonderful teacher, critic, and human being, Gareth Lloyd Evans, that rekindled my enthusiasm for performance, and then at the University of Kent, with Reg Foakes, my boss and now my friend, I directed some student productions, including AYL.  In those years Jonathan Miller was invited to give the University’s Eliot Lectures: they generated Miller’s Subsequent Performances, (Faber, 1986), which I think is still the best book on performance on both stage and screen.  I have also learnt a huge amount about performance and gender theory from the writings of Barbara Hodgdon (“Sexual Disguise and the Theatre of Gender,” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy, Alexander Leggatt, ed., Cambridge, 2002), Phyllis Rackin (“Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine,” in the Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, 102, 1987), and Carol Rutter (Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage, Routledge, 2001)—all of whom relate theory to performance actualities.

MPJ: Has there been anything published on the play since your book that you wish you could have used?

MH: I am in the fortunate position of being able to prepare a new edition.  This will enable me to take account of Cynthia Marshall’s Shakespeare in Production edition (Cambridge, 2004), Robert Smallwood’s account of performances at Stratford (Shakespeare at Stratford: As You Like It, Arden, 2003), the huge contribution made by Juliet Dusinberre’s Arden 3 edition of the play (although I will be taking courteous issue with some of her findings), and also of Tiffany Stern’s pioneering work. Stern is one of those scholars who assembles familiar material and excitingly recategorises it. Her Making Shakespeare: from stage to page in the Accents on Shakespeare series (Routledge, 2004) forces us to think hard about the different kinds of manuscript that must have been assembled for the printing of a play, and the title of her article “Was Totus mundus agit histrionem Ever the Motto of the Globe Theatre?” (Theatre Notebook, 51, 1997) provokes the answer, “Almost certainly not!”

MPJ: As time goes by, I grow more fascinated by chronicle plays. Is there a book that gives readers a good overview of chronicle plays, not just Shakespeare’s, but the chronicle movement, if I can all it that?

MH: Warren Chernaik has just brought out a lively and admirable introduction to Shakespeare’s histories (The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s History Plays, (Cambridge University Press, 2007) that mingles historical criticism and theatre history. Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles, (Routledge, 1990) and Larry S. Champion, The Noise of Threatening Drum: Dramatic Strategy and Political Ideology in Shakespeare and the English Chronicle Plays (University of Delaware Press, 1990) are useful synoptic surveys that do not try to homogenise the plays—as previous critics used to do.

MPJ: You wrote in 1990 that the case both for and against Shakespeare’s sole authorship of Henry VI, part one has yet to be proved. Do you still feel this way, and how have the issues have evolved since you wrote your introduction?

MH: I am more than ever convinced that neither side can prove a case. First, I think that those brilliant young men, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Peele, Greene, Lodge, and Nashe must have known one another well, and that a fair amount of improvised parodying of each other’s styles must have taken place when they met up.  It was a good joke by Shakespeare to ventriloquize Marlowe when he had Joan la Pucelle adopt the verbal style of Tamburlaine in 1 Henry VI.  Second, I wish I had invited—and someone should—a good statistician to analyse the graphs and findings published in papers like Gary Taylor, “Shakespeare and Others: The Authorship of 1 Henry VI” in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 7 (1995). The amount of data is comparatively small (and Taylor’s tables contain inaccuracies), and I have a hunch that the neo-disintegrationists are guilty of exaggerating the significance of their deviance curves, ignoring random statistical variation. Sir Brian Vickers, “Incomplete Shakespeare: Or, Denying Coauthorship in 1 Henry VI,” (Shakespeare Quarterly, 58:3, 2007), uses metrical tests and source material to much better effect and adduces a quantity of evidence that supports the case for Nashe’s hand in the play. It is surprising, however, that he does not address the problem of dating or examine in detail the case for Marlowe’s contribution. He also fails to consider the implications of Nashe’s famous reference to Talbot on the stage in Pierce Penilesse—a puff for Nashe’s own work?  I have to admit that my interest in performance possibilities outweighs my concerns over authorship problems, yet, having revisited the debate, I would not, at the moment, be tempted to rewrite radically what I had to say about that topic in my introduction to 1 Henry VI, where I relate the first part of the play to the structure of the whole trilogy. Nor would I want “Shakespeare, Nashe, et al.” to appear on the front of the volume.

MPJ: Which books are especially helpful to you as an editor of Shakespeare?

MH: I was exceedingly fortunate, as an MA student at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, to study Shakespeare with the late Don McKenzie (the bibliographer D.F. McKenzie who was, also, a critic and a charismatic teacher who had absorbed the best of what F.R. Leavis had to offer). The acute logical processes Don brought to bibliographical evidence and his passionate concern for accuracy inspire (or rather haunt) my work—I could never match his standards.  But I am always inclined to believe that very few books have the same kind of publishing and printing history. (See D. F. McKenzie, Making Meaning: “Printers of the mind” and other essays, Peter D. McDonald and Michael Felix Suarez eds., University of Massachusetts Press, 2002). Another fellow New Zealander, Andrew Gurr, has written a number of histories of playhouses, companies, and performance conditions, which are essential. His The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642 has been revised several times, showing how it has become a standard reference for a couple of generations of historians and students; Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London and The Shakespearian Playing Companies are also standard works—although they have not replaced E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan stage, 4 volumes (The Clarendon Press, 1923). Of course they add a great deal of information, but they present it in a different way.  Like everyone, I constantly use Charlton Hinman’s facsimile of the Folio (Norton, 1968), and Michael Allen and Kenneth Muir’s volume that reprints all of the Quartos (University of California Press, 1981), but now, of course we have the riches of the internet. The British Library’s Quarto website, http://www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/homepage.html is a masterpiece of electronic design.

I have just finished writing an e-book on Richard II. I enjoyed the task, especially the possibility of inserting hyperlinks. An assiduous student, perhaps in an institution without a good library, could go straight from my e-text to look at some quarto editions of the play, a facsimile of Holinshed, or to a translation of the Vindiciae contra tyrannos. People lambaste the Internet because it encourages plagiarism: properly used it can foster originality. I use “Literature Online” and “Early English Books Online” constantly as an editor and author. Frankly, however, the Oxford English Dictionary may be my greatest support. You would think that Shakespearean texts would, by now, have been properly glossed—one of the prime tasks of an editor. They have not. When Le Beau says of Celia that she is “taller” than Rosalind, he does not mean she is bigger, but that she is feistier. I discovered that in OED. It destroys the case of earlier critics who thought that the fact that Rosalind says that she is “more than common tall” indicates some large-scale revision for a revival when a different pair of boys was used for these two parts. OED and Gordon Williams’ dictionaries of the sexual language of the time (Shakespeare’s Sexual Language, Continuum, 2006) also revealed that Rosalind often speaks more “greasily” than previous generations thought. It’s not easy, however, to find an appropriate register when glossing what is called in this context “bawdy”—and sometimes rather tedious.

MPJ: In your edition of 3 Henry VI, you compare that play favorably with some others, such as Locrine (c. 1954) and Thomas Lord Cromwell (c. 1600) that are not as fine. Are there, however, good chronicle plays that are not by Shakespeare?

MH: To be truthful, I am not very taken by non-Shakespearean chronicles—with the exception of course of Edward II (c. 1590). Marlowe and Shakespeare established the genre, and others bob in their wake. I don’t for a moment believe that much of Edward III is by Shakespeare—its registers and especially its ideology seem totally “Peelean” to me. Again the RSC did a good production in 2002 (with one of my ex-students, Caroline Faber, playing the Countess of Salisbury), but I felt I was watching a curiosity that had been extracted from its cabinet. I was, however, very enthusiastic about the production by the RSC in 2005 of an almost-chronicle, the collaborative play Sir Thomas More. That along with the other plays in the “Gunpowder Season” was well worth reviving.

MPJ: And on the subject of other playwrights, your Elizabethan Popular Theatre looks at stage practices in part by studying Titus Andronicus, Marlowe’s Edward II and Doctor Faustus, the anonymous Mucedorus, and The Spanish Tragedy by a Kyd named Tommy. I would guess that not all SNL readers have read all of these plays, and they are missing a lot. Well, OK, lest I get all self-righteous, I’ll admit that I have not read Mucedorus yet. Why should the Shakespeare-centric look at these other plays?

MH: The Spanish Tragedy is a great thing—I like to compare its mixtures of long set speeches, or “passions” as the Elizabethans called them, with the arias in Monteverdi’s operas, with which they are roughly contemporaneous. But it also packs a political punch, asking the radical question, where do you go for justice when the fountainhead of justice, the monarchy, is itself polluted? As for Mucedorus, we should simply read it because it was one of the most popular plays of its age—judged by the number of times it was reprinted. It is a romance, and that reminds us that the straitjackets of the Aristotelian dramatic categories, tragedy and comedy, don’t help us much with this period. We need to remember the chronicles, the romances, the problem plays (in the sense that The Spanish Tragedy, like Measure for Measure, is a problem play). As in The Winter’s Tale, a bear makes an entrance in Mucedorus.

MPJ: I like it! I enjoyed your editions of Knight and New Inn. Not everyone reading this is very familiar with Beaumont and Jonson. Where should they go to learn more?

MH: I think it is better to read more plays than more criticism.  Knight engages with the citizen comedies that were being written at the time and, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, pillories those who assume that theatrical performances should create illusion. It is a revel, offering pastiche versions of various kinds of folk-drama of the period—Rafe comes out and presents himself to his audience as do actors in mummers” plays. Like Don Quixote, it offers affectionate parodies of the romances of the period, although its own structure is like theirs, episodic, and it ignores the Aristotelian imperatives of knotting up and then unknotting a plot or intrigue. Ben Jonson was always one to mock romance conventions, but The New Inn may be a slightly awkward tribute to his late rival, Shakespeare. Jonson takes a romance plot and gives it a local habitation in Barnet in Hertfordshire, near London.  It remembers Shakespeare’s late romances, although it eschews any exotic setting such as Bohemia or Sicily, and does what Jonson had scarcely even done, in plays or poems, includes amused but warm wooing sequences. (One of Jonson’s poems in The Forest begins, “Why I write not of love.”) The hero and heroine exhibit the kind of diffident feelings for one another that we see in Beatrice and Benedick, and need the help of their friends to forge a betrothal one with another.

MPJ: I recently noticed a possible resonance for the Citizen who leaps upon the stage in the induction to Knight. He is free the grocer’s guild. Both he and his apprentice do time on stage in the play, especially the apprentice. Thanks to Dave Kathman, we know that many actors were apprentices or freed from the grocer’s guild, more than many other guilds (“Grocers, goldsmiths, and drapers: freemen and apprentices in the Elizabethan theater,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 55:1, 2004). I wonder if this was a bit of a goof on Beaumont’s part, as if he were joking, “Geez, every grocer thinks he’s an actor.” At the very least, Beaumont took the trouble to make him a grocer, when he could have left his profession out. Are there other playwrights from this era who should not be missed?

MH: There is still a lot of Middleton and Massinger that scarcely ever gets performed—I’d love to see a production of Fletcher and Massinger’s The Sea Voyage which, like the plays I have just mentioned, mingles conventions, and again remembers Shakespeare, this time The Tempest.  I hope that the RSC’s Swan Theatre in Stratford, presently closed because of the rebuilding of the complex, will revert to the kind of repertory, based on Jacobean plays, for which it was built.

MPJ: So do I. Aside from readings at the Globe in London and at the Blackfriars in Virginia, you don’t see these plays performed. Your “Critics Debate” Hamlet does a great job of giving voice to the many Hamlet arguments up until shortly before 1987, when the book was published. Who has argued since, and why should we listen to them?

MH: I have become particularly interested in seeing and reading about “foreign” productions, which used Shakespeare as a tool for exploring the forms and pressures of our times. I was lucky enough to be taken by some students, when I was in Krakow during the period of Solidarity and martial law, to see a revival of Wajda’s production of Hamlet. It is not just a question of the frisson of being present when a production becomes a political event, but of experiencing what is necessary for every critic, a way of making strange an over-familiar text. Later in Sofia at the “Shakespeare in the New Europe” conference, with my Bulgarian colleagues Alexander Shurbanov and Boika Sokolova, with Marta Gabinska from Poland, and Jim Siemon from Boston, I learned so much about the way the world changed in 1989—not in the way we thought at the time. Then, three years ago, with gifted Shakespeareans like Madalina Nicolaescu, I was at the magnificent Craiova Shakespeare Festival in Romania. About seven plays in seven days, the majority from Eastern Europe. These were as stimulating times as I have ever had. I am honoured to have been co-opted onto the new executive committee of the European Shakespeare Research Association (http://www.um.es/shakespeare/esra) which had one of its biennial conferences in Iasi, Romania, last year. This is a unique non-Anglophone organisation, and I think that all native speakers of the language in which Shakespeare wrote have so much to learn from productions in other languages and writings from other cultures. This is partly because so much Anglophone Shakespeare criticism, in the last decades of the twentieth century, was written for a coterie of elite academics. It’s highly intelligent, and occasionally fascinating, but I prefer readings that can be tested by the disciplines of performance.

MPJ: Let me confess that I have great affection for Branagh’s Much Ado, despite your quite valid comments. You have not done much Shakespeare film criticism, but it is on a higher level that most that I have read. Whose work has impressed you?

MH: I’d recommend books by Kenneth Rothwell and Anthony Davies as well as Jonathan Miller (see above). Rothwell’s A History of Shakespeare on Screen, (Cambridge, 1999) is a genial and informed volume that artfully combines critique with chronicle, and Davies’ Filming Shakespeare’s Plays: The Adaptations of Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Peter Brook and Akira Kurosawa, (Cambridge, 1988) establishes the “great tradition” in this field. In France, Michèle Willems, Sarah Hatchuel, and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin have edited various useful collections of criticism of screen and television Shakespeare. Their Shakespeare on Screen series (Publications de l’Université de Rouen), with volumes devoted to single plays, have grown out of splendid conferences that have attracted established and emerging scholars from around the world. Barbara Hodgdon’s essays are unparalleled (see, for example, The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). Diana E. Henderson, A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen, (Blackwell, 2006) complements Russell Jackson’s Cambridge Companion to the same topic. When I’m writing about film, I usually have a good anthology of theoretical essays to hand: Gerald Mast, Leo Braudy, Marshall Cohen, (eds.) Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, (Oxford University Press, 4e, 1992). I find it perpetually useful—it is large and includes classic essays from both Europe and the United States. I am often surprised at how “old” essays in that volume, for example Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures” (published 1934) and Hugo Münsterberg’s “The Means of the Photoplay” of 1916, continue to stimulate me.

MPJ: Thanks for giving me an excuse to set the record straight about something in Henderson’s book. Antony R. Gunerante’s essay cites an article of mine, for which I thank him, but he has a fact wrong. In a Shakespeare Bulletin article (18:4, 2000), I reproduced some on-set photographs of scenes not used in the 1935 film, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. These are not frame-blowups, as Gunerante states on page 42. Frame blow-ups would prove these scenes, in the screenplay but not in the movie, were filmed. I can only prove that the actors were in costume and on those sets, which suggests that those scenes were filmed, but falls short of proving it, so that is not my claim. Enough of that. Here is a purely selfish question. No one has published a book on an important area of Shakespeare film studies. A friend and I have discussed editing one, but one of our challenges is finding contributors. Mick, you have 51 different people in the Blackwell Companion, including yourself. How on earth did you find them all?

MH: Yet again Dame Fortune has played a part. The great Reformation historian Patrick Collinson was at Kent during the last years of my career there, and I was able to run interdisciplinary seminars with him. It happened that we both moved to Sheffield the same summer, and I was able to continue working with him in South Yorkshire. Through him, I got to know about those cultural historians who were making waves. I much admire those critics who write about history as well as literature—not necessarily the “new historicists.”  Names like that of Michael Neill and Susan Ceresano come to mind. Although I am an atheist, I believe that we must study the religious movements of the early modern period in order to understand it. Obviously Patrick gave me a steer in this direction as well. Sometimes I think we ought to junk the concept of “Renaissance England” and write about “Reformation England” in the way people write about “Reformation Germany.” That is why I called my last monograph Renaissance and Reformations: I am afraid you have to stick “Renaissance” into a title for marketing purposes. Incredible though it may seem, Blackwell have asked me, and I have accepted the invitation, to revise that Blackwell Companion and increase its length by 50%—into two volumes. I have asked all current contributors to recommend the names of brilliant younger colleagues, and have reaped a goodly crop of suggestions. I am also Master Accost at the Folger or the International Shakespeare Conference, and ask people I meet there. It is more important to have first-rate contributors than to have “coverage” of the field—which is impossible anyway.

MPJ: What books helped direct your career?

MH: Although the “New Critics” have gone out of fashion, the conviction that the study of literature is a moral activity came to me through exposure to the writings of F.R. Leavis, some of whose supervisions I attended in Cambridge—although by then he had lost his flair and was endlessly repetitive. L.C. Knights had been a fellow Scrutiny editor, and although their visions of the good society and the good life seem quaint fantasies now, I often feel I am still a “Leavisite” in my bones. Knights’ Cambridge lectures on Shakespeare were superb. Then of course Raymond Williams was in Cambridge at that time, and I have used his categories on many occasions. Later I was a colleague of Molly Mahood, whose Shakespeare’s Wordplay (1957) is a book to which I regularly return. It was chastening to be appointed to the Chair at Sheffield which Knights had held—as had Geoffrey Bullough and, later, Sir William Empson. Empson’s writings make us learn that language “creates what it conveys” (that formula was in fact deployed by Leavis), and the work I am currently doing uses a rhetorical approach to social analysis. What I mean by that is that what the rhetoricians called “discovery” (the mental retrieval of words and material) leads to “discovery” in the modern sense of exploration of the external world. Quentin Skinner has recently been fascinated by the rhetorical figure of paradiastole or redefinition (see Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, Cambridge University Press, 1996). His discussions have helped give a focus to my next monograph, which I think of as a respectful rewriting of Knights’ Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (1937). But Empson will also have left a mark: Knights was a Marxist—I shall be concerned much more with ambiguity and the structure of complex words (see Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, Chatto & Windus, 1930, revised edition 1953, and The Structure of Complex Words, Chatto & Windus, 1951).

Reflecting on this as I write it makes me realise that it was the books I read forty years ago that have made a mark, along with more recent writings by social and cultural historians. This either says something about me, or indicates that perhaps the New Critics made a greater contribution than the structuralists, historicists, psychoanalytic writers, and postmodernists who have raised so many waves recently.

MPJ: I hope that others will think about that. Thanks, Mick.  I really appreciate your thoughtful answers and insights into your work.