[In the following essay, Baker argues that the absence of Leonato's wife Innogen in Much Ado about Nothing necessitates a reevaluation of the play's characters, especially the immediate members of Leonato's family.]

“Reade him, therefore; and againe, and againe,” enjoined Henry Condell and John Heminge, the supervisors of the publication of the First Folio, and this injunction to the “great Variety of Readers” contrasts with their depiction of a Shakespeare who never blotted a line and was thus presumably free from the need to reread his own work. Yet rereaders of Shakespeare's plays may find themselves in the position of the plotting Prospero as he watches Miranda and Ferdinand confirm their love according to a script that he has largely devised: “So glad of this as they I cannot be, / Who are surpris'd with all; but my rejoicing / At nothing can be more” (The Tempest, 3.1.93). That is, rereaders of a Shakespeare play may discover nuances and layers of meaning that delight them as nothing else, but some of the surprise is gone after their first experience of the play. Attacking what he terms the “new histrionicism,” Harry Berger describes this dilemma as the conflict between “wide-eyed” playgoing and the “slit-eyed” analysis of the armchair Shakespearean, but we do not have to confine the scope of the problem to the page/stage controversy.¹ It is possible, of course, to attend performances of the same play again and again. In return for a better critical perspective on either performance or text, the “rereader” of a play would seem to lose the capacity to approach the world of the play as a completely new one and to behold it with Miranda-like innocence and wonder.²

The notorious instability of Shakespearean plays, however, provides some relief from the apparent dichotomy between the freshness of a first reading and the more jaded stance of the rereader.³ For paradoxically a rereading of a Shakespeare play is often a first reading, too—at least, of some parts of the play. Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare's plays reveal this paradox at its crudest. Modern readers typically experience surprise and even outrage when they compare Tate's adaptation (1681) of King Lear to the Folio text of the play or Shakespeare's Tempest to the Dryden-Davenant version (1667).⁴ (Davenant's The Law against Lovers (1662) amalgamated elements from the plots of Much Ado and Measure for Measure, but the title of the adaptation does not identify it with either Shakespearean source.) However, the more recent project of “unediting” Shakespeare has shown that, such outrage notwithstanding, we are still reading adaptations of his plays. Thus, the practice, originating in the eighteenth century, of conflating the quarto and Folio texts of King Lear is now the object of considerable skepticism, and this kind of skepticism has led to reexaminations of the texts of other Shakespearean plays and poems, too.⁵ The more carefully we reread Shakespeare, the more we seem to discover that we have yet to read him.

Character is no exception to this difficulty of fully distinguishing between Shakespeare reread and Shakespeare read for the first time. The Davenant-Dryden Tempest, for instance, introduces a number of new characters, and thus to move from this adaptation to the list of characters in the Folio Tempest is to experience a jolt. The dramatis personae, on the other hand, that accompany modern editions of Shakespeare's plays suggest that the identity of his characters is immutably fixed. They will stay the same no matter how many times they are read. Yet, as Randall McLeod has argued, Shakespeare's characters are “Poped” in most modern editions of the plays (“The Very Names of Persons” 88-96). Textual editors have imposed eighteenth-century notions of individuality and identity on these characters and rendered them more coherent than they are in seventeenth-century editions of the plays. Reread in the texts in which they first appeared, the characters of the Shakespearean quartos and the First Folio have a capacity to surprise that their counterparts in modern editions of the plays possess only faintly.

I want to examine one such potentially surprising character and her capacity to affect our rereading of Much Ado about Nothing, a play that, like The Tempest, concerns nuptials largely scripted by others besides the bride and bridegroom. Innogen, the wife of Leonato, appears in two stage directions to the Quarto of Much adoe about Nothing (1600) as well as the Folio version of the play, but editors, beginning with Theobald, have excised her role and relegated her to a textual note.⁶ Innogen is a “ghost” character—one who is alluded to in stage directions but given no speaking part—and, as a consequence of her disappearance from the play, she has received scant attention from its critics. Michael Friedman has made a good case for the performability of Innogen's role (49-50), but to most critics of the play Innogen has represented little more than an “abandoned intention” (Wells 3-4) or at best a character who “possibly should be seen but is certainly not heard” (Smidt 399). Both of these dismissals, however, exclude the possibility of her silence being an “open” and interpretable one. As Philip McGuire and Christina Luckyj have shown, the silence of women in Renaissance plays is often meant to be heard (McGuire 1-18; Luckyj 42-48). Nor is this silence necessarily tantamount to acquiescence. Albeit a “ghost” character, Innogen may haunt the play.

Innogen, however, is “ghostly” in another way; for she has the potential to make a play that has been read again and again seem strange and unfamiliar. Indeed, Theobald's suppression of Innogen renders her appearance in the Quarto and the Folio all the more dramatic:

I have ventured to expunge [this name]; there being no mention of her through the play, no one speech addressed to her, nor one syllable spoken to her. … It seems as if the poet had in his first plan designed such a character; which, on a survey of it, he found would be superfluous, and therefore left it out.

(Variorum Much Ado 7)

Theobald's completion of what he saw as Shakespeare's intended revisions makes an implicit argument about the incompleteness of Shakespeare's own rereading of Much Ado. That is, Shakespeare reread the play carefully enough to know that he wanted to expunge Innogen—i.e., blot some of his own lines—but then did not check to see whether he had remembered to do this. More important, however, Theobald's elimination of Innogen has the potential to highlight Innogen for the modern rereader of the play, who may find the presence of Innogen in the Quarto and Folio doubly intriguing precisely because Theobald deemed it superfluous. Reading backwards is, of course, a prominent feature of rereading in general: for instance, one detects an echo of an earlier scene in the fifth act of a play, and this echo leads to a rereading of the earlier scene. Yet problems of textual editing force the rereader to reverse course in a broader sense. We reread the Quarto of Much adoe in a historically “preposterous” manner.⁷ After becoming dissatisfied or intrigued with later emendations and adaptations, rereaders return to the texts of the play that historically came first.

The opening stage direction of the play provides a key opportunity for such retrogressive rereading. In the Arden edition, this stage direction reads:

Enter Leonato Governor of Messina, Hero his daughter, and Beatrice his niece, with a Messenger.

On the other hand, the Quarto reads:

Enter Leonato governour of Messina, Innogen his wife, Hero his daughter, and Beatrice his neece, with a messenger.

In both cases, this opening direction presents Leonato as the center of a number of family relations and as the source of political power in Messina, but these relations change when one rereads the play in the Quarto. Preserved in a textual note to the Arden Much Ado, Innogen, however, prompts this rereading of the Quarto. Thus, as an example of how the play appears in modern editions, the Arden Much Ado shows the contradictory effect of Theobald's emendation. Innogen is not so much thoroughly expunged from the play as made into a silent provocation. She invites a historically preposterous rereading of the play in the first textual form that we have of it.

What difference, however, does Innogen's presence make to Much Ado? How does she enable the rereader to experience surprise? Most obviously, she necessitates a reappraisal of Leonato's family. As Claire McEachern has argued, Much Ado may concern the relations between fathers and daughters as much as King Lear (274-87), and it seems to depict a father-daughter bond as intense as those in plays such as The Tempest and Lear, which isolate the fathers and daughters from mothers. Leonato's lack of a wife intensifies the father-daughter bond of the play. On the other hand, the presence of Innogen, who in the Quarto stage direction is neatly situated between Leonato and Hero, makes the “family romance” of the play more triangular. This is not to deny the importance of the bond between Leonato and Hero but only to suggest that this bond is mediated by another character. At the very least, Innogen's appearance in the stage direction raises the possibility of evaluating Leonato as a husband and a father.

Reread in the light of Innogen's appearance in the Quarto of Much adoe, other relationships and exchanges between two characters become more triangular, as well. Thus, upon arriving at Messina, Don Pedro immediately identifies Hero as Leonato's daughter: Leonato's reply jokingly suggests suspicion (lines 100-05; all quotations are from the Shakespeare Quarto Facsimiles edition of the play):

[DON] Pedro[:]
You embrace your charge too willingly: I thincke this is your daughter.
LEONATO[:]
Her mother hath many times tolde me so.
BENED. [Benedick:]
Were you in doubt sir that you askt her?
LEONATO[:]
Signior Benedicke, no, for then were you a child.

As far as the stage directions are concerned, Innogen is present during this male banter, where Leonato, by his very denial, conjures up the possibility of an adult Benedick impregnating Innogen. In The Tempest Prospero asserts in an equally dubious manner Miranda's legitimacy: “Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and / She said thou wast my daughter.” But, although Prospero's wife is, as Stephen Orgel has argued, an “absent presence” in The Tempest, she never materializes to the point of having a stage direction devoted to her (50-51). On the other hand, the scene as we have it in the Quarto Much adoe contains Innogen as a silent hearer of her husband's jocular aspersions.

When included in the play rather than consigned to a textual note, Innogen instigates a rereading of other characters and their relationships. Leonato's reference to the mother of Hero is a fleeting one, but since in the Quarto she is on stage, we are more entitled to wonder about the degree to which Leonato's marriage provides the model for his treatment of Hero and vice versa. Is Leonato's joking suspicion of his own wife the reason he is so ready to believe Claudio's accusation of Hero later in the play? On the other hand, Innogen's silence offers a way of explaining Hero's submissiveness. This silence certainly reveals the effect of marriage on the only female character of the play who is a wife. Indeed, a kind of preposterous rereading obtains here, too. To be sure, one could read Innogen's silence as proleptic of Hero's actions and predicament, but a more likely model is that of returning to the opening stage direction after having read the rest of the play. It is only in the light of what comes later that this opening stage direction and Innogen's presence in the scene become significant.

A play as reread as Much Ado would not seem to have too many secrets left. In particular, Much Ado would also seem to have been sufficiently mined for literary allusions in the names of its characters. But the name Innogen offers the rereader another surprise in the form of its provenance, which is legendary British history. For Innogen was the wife of Brutus, the supposedly Trojan founder of Britain, and the daughter of a Greek king, Pandrasus, whom Brutus defeated in battle. The marriage of Brutus and Innogen was of dynastic importance because its progeny were a race of kings and queens, but this marriage also constituted a sign of revenge and conquest. As Holinshed's Chronicles puts it, the first article of peace between Brutus and Pandrasus was that “Pandrasus should give his daughter Innogen unto Brute in marriage, with a competent summe of gold and silver for her dowrie” (439). Like Katherine in Henry V, Innogen was one of the concessions yielded by her father to the young man who had overpowered him militarily. (Indeed, even before coming to Greece, Brutus had already killed his own father in a hunting accident, and this accident was the reason for his exile.) Although Brutus and his band ultimately settled in England, not Greece, Innogen still signified an older generation's transferral of its power and authority to Brutus.

As a mother—the other aspect of her role that Holinshed's Chronicles emphasizes—Innogen also enabled Brutus to provide for the continuation of his newfound power and rule:

When Brutus had builded this citie, and brought the Iland fullie under his subjection, he by the advise of his nobles commanded this Ile … to be called Britaine; and the inhabitants Britons after his name, for a perpetuall memorie that he was the first bringer of them into the land. In the meanwhile also he had by his wife iii sonnes, the first named Locrinus or Locrine, the second Cambris.

(443)

This passage is replete with names and naming, and these names all perpetuate Brutus. The name of the Britons serves as an abiding reminder of Brutus's leadership just as his son Locrinus constitutes the means of extending that leadership into the distant future. Significantly, the only unnamed figure in the passage is Innogen, who appears as “his wife.” This anonymity again indicates her identity as a link between two generations of men—here, Brutus and his sons rather than Brutus and his surrogate father. Yet this anonymity is arguably only apparent when we reread Holinshed in the wake of the Quarto of Much adoe. That is, the Quarto renders Innogen's ghostly presence in Holinshed noticeable.

The Quarto of Much adoe displaces Holinshed's Innogen and provides the opportunity to reread Holinshed in the context of a Sicilian comic setting. As Northrop Frye long ago pointed out, Sicily could function in Renaissance plays and poetry as a kind of surrogate Britain, and in Cymbeline virtually the same set of names, Imogen and Posthumus Leonatus, reappear during a somewhat later era of British history.⁸ But reread in the comic context of Much adoe, Holinshed's dynastic history plot acquires new emphases. Shakespeare, of course, could have named one of the characters of Much adoe Brutus if he had wanted to allude to Holinshed's plot in a way that retained Holinshed's emphasis on male succession. But since the name Innogen conjures up Holinshed in Much adoe, the focus of the male dynastic plot also shifts to the effect of this plot on wives and would-be wives. This shift is, to some degree, generic: comedy may promote patriarchy, but it does require some interaction between the sexes. Yet, the point is not only that the Innogen story reads differently in the Quarto of Much adoe but that it may reread differently in Holinshed after one has detected the allusion to this story in the Quarto. Indeed, there is not much of an Innogen story in Holinshed until Much adoe underscores her significance. Holinshed's Innogen is available preposterously, i.e., to a rereader.

The name Innogen is evocative in Much adoe, and it impinges upon Much adoe in the same allusive way that the name Claudius affects the meaning of Hamlet.⁹ We are, of course, so used to reading again and again the identification of Hamlet's uncle as Claudius in both editions and criticism of the play that the paucity of textual evidence for this identification may seem surprising. Yet as Harold Jenkins points out, the name Claudius appears in only one speech heading and one stage direction of Hamlet (432-33). Elsewhere Hamlet's uncle is the king. Nevertheless, the identification of Hamlet's uncle as Claudius has become an entrenched part of criticism of the play, and interpreters have proved willing to reread Hamlet in relation to parallels from Roman history and vice versa.

But the evocativeness of Innogen's name provides a model for rereading other parts of Holinshed, too, and in particular the character of another wife from legendary British history. For even among Britain's first monarchs, a wife could be provoked to abandon, for a time, the role defined by Innogen. Thus, as Holinshed's Chronicles goes on to relate, Locrine, Innogen's son and Brutus's heir, and Guendolene, the daughter of one of Brutus's most valued allies, were married, and he aroused her ire by loving and having a child by another woman (444). Guendolene promptly defeated her husband in battle, imprisoned him, and, as Spenser puts it in The Faerie Queene, “first taught men a woman to obay” (2.10.20). Nevertheless, when her son came of age, Guendolene did consign her power to him. Albeit something of a Semiramis figure, Guendolene finally restored the male dynastic line from which she had briefly deviated.

The Quarto of Much adoe provides analogues to both the Innogen and Guendolene plots. On the one hand, Don Pedro and his band of uprooted soldiers (they are all from different places; Claudio from Florence, Benedick from Padua, and Don Pedro from Aragon) are the young warriors who have established themselves in battle and now must ratify their positions through marriage. Leonato and his brother are the older men whose daughter(s) initially provoke enmity but must finally signify the peace between the two generations. This intergenerational strife is implicit in Leonato's remark that Hero must be his daughter because Benedick was a child when she was conceived. Leonato, we may infer, is considerably older than Benedick. But intergenerational strife becomes explicit when Leonato and his brother challenge Claudio to a duel after the pretended death of Hero. Thus, the Prince and Claudio joke about these threats from “two old men without teeth” (ln. 2,207).

Innogen and Guendolene are not necessarily meant to be contrasted in Holinshed, but the Quarto of Much adoe indicates a possible rereading of Holinshed that underscores the divide between these two figures. For the Guendolene plot is also a part of Much adoe in the form of the merry warriors, Beatrice and Benedick, who do provide the play with a certain amount of contrast.¹⁰ Indeed, a “jades tricke” of inconstancy (ln. 140) may have been the initial provocation of their merry war just as Locrine's unfaithfulness led to his battle with his wife. But, whatever its ultimate cause, the continual “skirmish of wit” (lns. 60-61) between Beatrice and Benedick rivals and at times replaces the skirmishes confined to men only. Beatrice inaugurates her first skirmish of wit with Benedick as an interruption of the male banter over Hero: “I wonder that you will still be talking, signior Benedicke, no body markes you” (lns. 112-13). This remark effectively highlights herself and Benedick as combattants.

Reread in the context of Shakespeare's Sicily, the distinction between the two female types—Innogen and Guendolyne—becomes more pronounced. Benedick makes this distinction most explicit by dubbing Beatrice “my Ladie Tongue” (ln. 676), and, appropriately enough, the next and final appearance of Innogen in the play occurs during a scene that Beatrice dominates. Thus, subsequent Quarto stage directions read as follows: “Enter Leonato, his brother, his wife, Hero his daughter, and Beatrice his neece, and a kinsman” (lns. 415-16). On the other hand, modern editions of the play generally retain the “kinsman”—who is, as Stanley Wells writes, the “shade of a shade”—and remove Leonato's wife, whose lack of a name here suggests that she is beginning to fade from the play.

Despite such fading, however, the silence of Leonato's wife should provoke a rereading of those parts of the scene whose focus is speech. For if Innogen is on stage when Leonato blames Beatrice's lack of a husband on her shrewdness of “tongue” (ln. 433), their exchange becomes yet another triangular one. Innogen's silence both exemplifies Leonato's ideal of a wife and at the same time provides a vantage point from which Leonato's admonitions concerning the silence of wives can be reread and critiqued. Beatrice, at least, claims to be able to see a “church by day-light” (ln. 489), a formulation that suggests both the necessity and difficulty of perceiving the obvious. So, too, Innogen's silent presence as “wife” is both hard to avoid yet at the same time something to which we must return again and again to get. Significantly, Beatrice's reference to her own ability to see the institution of marriage for what it is gives the cue for the maskers to enter, and this sequence of events suggests that disguise is a recourse of both playwrights and social groups when awkward silences become too apparent. Nevertheless, at the same time, the attempt to hide what is there invites renewed scrutiny. Like Theobald's suppression of Innogen, the onslaught of the maskers has the potential to provoke a rereading of what their arrival obscures.

Innogen's silence, however, is doubly awkward. For it invites a rereading of the relations among the male characters of the play, too. Such rereading reveals that, despite the apparent fixity of the dramatis personae in modern editions of Much Ado, even the identities of some of the play's primary characters are tenuous and “ghostly.” Thus, the preposterousness of rereading Much Ado from the perspective of a marginal character indicates the instability of the play's center, too. Leonato, in particular, offers some surprises to the rereader of the play, since dramatis personae of modern editions of the play regularly echo the opening stage direction and identify him as “governor” of Messina. This identification then contributes to the apparent solidity of Leonato's authority.

The play's villain, however, provides a rather surprising bridge from Innogen to Leonato. The bastard John, dubbed “dumb John” in one stage direction of the Quarto of Much adoe (ln. 494), is the character whose silence provides the most explicit parallel to that of Innogen. “I am not of many wordes,” John tells Leonato in the first scene of the play (ln. 152), and this self-description (his first line) is often taken as a declaration of moroseness, or, as Hero puts it, “melancholy” (ln. 421). But John's lack of words should serve as a reminder that he, like Innogen, has been silently present during the banter over Hero's possible bastardy. Such banter does not directly allude to him, but it does highlight the stigma that sets him apart. As Jean Howard notes, women and bastards are the “natural and inevitable source of evil” in the play (175). Indeed, as a rebel who “of late stoode out” (lns. 362-63) against his brother, John is “trusted with a mussle” (ln. 372).

Given the dumbness of John, the silence of Leonato at crucial parts of the play is startling, for, unlike John, Leonato is a figure of supposedly legitimate authority. Yet a close rereading of the Quarto of Much adoe indicates a relative scarcity of references to Leonato's government. The opening stage direction of the play is in fact the only explicit textual basis for the designation of Leonato as governor of Messina. Neither in subsequent stage directions nor speech headings does Leonato ever reappear as “governor” of Messina. He is always Leonato. On the other hand, as the editor of the Arden Much Ado, A. R. Humphreys, has pointed out, other characters in the play are often identified in speech headings “by social function (Prince, Constable, Headborough) or morality trait (Bastard)” (78). Thus, for instance, one Quarto entrance reads “Enter Leonato, and the Constable, and the Headborough” (ln. 1,595), and the following entrance positions Leonato in a similar way amidst a different group of characters: “Enter Prince, Bastard, Leonato, Frier, Claudio, Benedicke, Hero, and Beatrice” (ln. 1,657). As far as textual evidence is concerned, both Dogberry's authority as constable and Don Pedro's as prince are more solid than Leonato's government of Messina.

Like the character of Innogen, Leonato's government of Messina is prominently introduced in the opening stage direction, only to be muted at crucial points of the play. As with Innogen, such muting then provides a kind of rereading of the opening stage directions. The Quarto of Much adoe, at least, does not so much solidly establish Leonato's government of Messina as make it a question to be asked again and again in the light of subsequent events. Thus, on the one hand, Dogberry and his cohorts do address Leonato as “your worship” (ln. 1,614), and Leonato does discharge the Watch of its prisoners, Borachio and Conrade. But this discharge occurs after the Watch and Sexton have done all the work—that of apprehending and examining the prisoners.

Borachio and Conrade, moreover, make their confession not to Leonato but to the prince. The two henchmen of Don John are under constabulary escort when Claudio asks Don Pedro to “Hearken after their offence” (ln. 2,296), and even Borachio requests that Don Pedro attend to what he has to say: “Sweete prince, … do you heare me” (lns. 2,312-13). As a hearer of Borachio's confession, Don Pedro presides over the crucial and long deferred revelation of the play while Leonato is offstage. When Leonato, accompanied by the Sexton, returns to the stage, he does so more in the capacity of an aggrieved father than the governor of Messina: “Art thou the slave that with thy breath hast killd / Mine innocent child?” (lns. 2,346-47). Only after Leonato has given ample vent to his paternal outrage does he officially claim the prisoners.

Who does govern Messina? This uncertainty is particularly acute in a play where power often manifests itself as the ability to hear what one wants to hear and silence everything else by remaining deaf to it.¹¹ In particular, after the slandering of Hero, Leonato finds himself in the position of a suitor who cannot get an audience. “Heare you my Lords?” (ln. 2,128) Leonato asks as the prince and Claudio make haste to avoid him. An exchange follows in which Leonato and his brother challenge the two younger men to a duel but are not taken seriously. Finally, the combattants part on a note of willfull deafness:

LEONATO[:]
My Lord, my Lord.
PRINCE[:]
I will not heare you.

(lns. 2,194-95)

The Prince effectively silences Leonato by refusing to hear what he has to say. The speech headings further reinforce the disparity between the two men. Don Pedro is speaking as prince and Leonato as subject rather than governor. Even after the deception of Conrade and Borachio is revealed, Leonato does not quite regain his governing authority as far as the prince is concerned. Thus, in his apology to Leonato, the prince claims that “to satisfie this good old man” (ln. 2,361), he will “bend under any heavy waight, / That heele enioyne me to” (lns. 2,362-63). Leonato may be able to enjoin the Prince to make amends, but such injunctions will come from “a good old man” rather than governor.

The apparent fixity of Leonato's identity as governor of Messina in modern editions of Much Ado, however, makes the instability of Leonato's authority in the Quarto of Much adoe all the more interesting and surprising. That is, just as Theobald's excision of Innogen contributes to the impact of her presence in the Quarto, so the play's undermining of Leonato's position acquires at least some of its significance preposterously—after that position has been established not only in the text of the play but its editing and reproduction as well. I am not, therefore, postulating a seventeenth-century first reading of Leonato's character that would be the same as my own rereading of it. Yet, as Margreta de Grazia puts it, once scholars begin to critique the eighteenth-century editorial assumptions about textual authenticity that mediate our understanding of Shakespeare “[i]t becomes possible to look for phenomena that have been minimized, transformed, or excluded by its preparation or ‘speaking beforehand’” (13). Nevertheless, such speaking beforehand is the necessary prologue to the retrieval of excluded or minimized phenomena such as the identities of Innogen and Leonato. Innogen's exclusion from later editions of the play spotlights, for the rereader, at least, her appearance in the Quarto.

More broadly, Shakespeare cannot be “unedited”—a form of rereading—until he has been thoroughly read, digested, and reconfigured in the adaptations of textual editors. Thus, despite its critique of eighteenth-century precursors, the project of “unediting” Shakespeare can be located squarely in an eighteenth-century tradition of textual editing. As Samuel Johnson put it, the first move of any textual editor is to “demolish the fabricks which are standing”—i.e., the work of preceding editors (“Preface to Shakespeare, 1765” 99). Yet such acts of demolition are never complete, as Johnson knew only too well. To reread the Quarto of Much adoe is to regain the lost element of surprise, but we must acknowledge the degree to which this surprise is combined with and even a function of Prospero-like jadedness rather than a rediscovery of the role of Miranda. For the perspective of a rereader is necessarily skewed. After centuries of editing and reading, the smallest details of the play loom large to us as they may not have to a seventeenth-century audience or readership. This does not mean that seventeenth-century first reactions to the play can never be hypothesized or, to some degree, recovered. Rather, we must be wary of making the goal of unediting Shakespeare that of approaching him “free of prior interpretation,” as McLeod puts it, and thus of denying our own status as rereaders.¹² For this goal is not historicism but rather the desire to recapture innocence.¹³

Notes

1. See Berger's Imaginary Audition 1-42. Berger is responding to Richard Levin's explicit critique of rereading Renaissance plays in New Readings vs. Old Plays. See Levin 1-10 and 194-207, where he links endless rereadings of Shakespeare and other Renaissance dramatists to both the New Criticism and the professionalization of literary studies as well as its attendant requirement to “publish or perish.” Berger engages Levin and his followers at the level of the stage/page debate, which he implicitly evokes. Thus, Levin supports an attitude of “humility” toward the “critical tradition that has been formed by generations of viewers and readers” (201). In other words, Levin argues that the significance of Renaissance plays was relatively stable for spectators and readers until the advent of the professional journal and the New Critical “reading,” which dissolved the harmony of page and stage. Another great vulnerability of Levin's attack, however, is the historical fact that the texts of Renaissance plays have never been stable and thus neither have performances of the plays. It should be noted, for instance, that my “with all” is taken from the notes to the Tempest in the Riverside Shakespeare, which show that the Folio reading is “with all,” a reading subsequently emended by Theobald (1637).

   I will be using “rereading” to include both the activities of a viewer who sees the play more than once and the armchair Shakespearean. It is also worth noting that the two are not mutually exclusive. Thus, for instance, like numerous Shakespearean quartos, the Quarto of Much adoe about Nothing is advertised on its title page as the text of what “hath been sundrie times publikely acted”—a formulation that suggests the possibility of spectators buying the text of a play that they had seen on stage and liked. Despite such links, however, the play as book is undoubtedly more easily reread than the play as performance. Thus, one can see an entire performance again and again, but only a book allows for the rereading of particular scenes and lines. Even the VCR is not the technological match of the book as far as rereading goes. On the VCR it is possible to return to a particular scene or line, but the reviewer is not equidistant from all parts of the play as is the rereader of a book. With its need of being rewound, the VCR is more at the level of the scroll or volumen rather than the codex, much less the printed book.

2. See Desmet 8-9 for a discussion of “reading” Shakespeare that includes the plays in performance.

3. Of course, problems of textual instability accompany the editing and criticism of virtually every writer. Nevertheless, Shakespearean texts display such instability to an unusually high degree.

4. Whether Restoration audiences experienced this kind of shock, however, is debatable.

5. I take the phrase “unediting Shakespeare” from Randall McLeod's “UNEditing Shak-Speare,” but, for other examples of this kind of important work, see also McLeod's “Unemending Shakespeare's Sonnet 111,” and “The Marriage of Good and Bad Quartos.” On the editing of King Lear see the essays in The Division of Kingdoms: Shakespeare's Two Versions of King Lear, ed. Gary Taylor and Michael Warren, eds., The Division of Kingdoms: Shakespeare's Two Versions of King Lear (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). See also Peter Stallybrass and Margreta de Grazia, “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” as well as de Grazia's Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus.

6. For discussion of Innogen, see the Variorum Much Ado 7: In a long textual note, the editors of the New Folger Shakespeare suggest that Innogen should constitute a “silent presence” in the play (Mowat and Werstine 199). But the text of their edition and that of all other contemporary editions that I have seen follows Theobald. The Variorum edition of the play does include Innogen, but it contains a good deal of editorial skepticism about her. My own argument is based upon the Quarto Much adoe, not because I think that the Quarto is necessarily more authoritative or authorial than the Folio Much adoe about Nothing, but, in part, because the Quarto has traditionally served as the foundation of later editions of the play. It is worth noting, however, that Innogen was not expunged from the Folio but appears in the same places there as in the Quarto (First Folio 101 and 104). On the dangers of making unwarranted assumptions about the relative authority of the Folio and Quarto editions of Shakespeare's plays, see Werstine, “McKerrow's Suggestion,” 157-59 and 166-68. For work on stage directions, including speech headings, see Linda McJannet's “Elizabethan Speech Prefixes: Page Design, Typography, and Mimesis” as well as Anthony Hammond's “Encounters of the Third Kind in Stage-Directions in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama.” The source for Innogen may be Messer Lionato's unnamed wife in “La Prima Parte de le Nouvelle del Bandello.” See Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare 112-34. Messer Lionato's wife is more a part of the plot than Shakespeare's Innogen. Shakespeare seems to have been more interested in Innogen as a name and a silent presence.

7. See Patricia Parker's “Preposterous Events” for more on the “Shakespearean preposterous.” For the most part Parker is discussing events within the plays, but she does give some indication of how preposterousness might be extended to the editing of the plays when she critiques the “critical construction of Shakespeare as an object of study, which … still reads back into the plays assumptions of stability, that straighten out the scandal of their ‘deformity,’ lost earlier versions, reassigned speeches, missing characters, or the logic of narrative or chronological lines” (212). For more on reading Shakespeare's plays “backwards,” see Berger, Imaginary Audition 35-37.

8. Frye makes the point about Sicily and the repetition of names in Cymbeline as part of a larger argument about the relation of Shakespearean comedy to romance (65). Interestingly, the issue of Imogen's name in Cymbeline also depends upon the page/stage debate. Simon Foreman's account of a contemporary performance of the play lists Imogen as Innogen, and thus Roger Warren has recently argued that the name Imogen in the Folio Cymbeline is a mistake (viii). Imogen, however, is a richly suggestive name—a cross, perhaps, between Innogen and “image.” In Cymbeline Imogen at times both thwarts and encourages the implication of her name that she will be a silent image. Thus, rejecting Cloten's advances, Imogen claims to be an unwilling speaker: “But that you shall not say, I yield being silent, / I would not speak.” She also apologizes for forgetting a “Ladies manners” and being “so verball” (First Folio 377). Here, she claims to speak only out of necessity, but, unlike her namesake in Much adoe, she does speak.

9. See Jonathon Goldberg, Voice Terminal Echo 68-101. Goldberg's analysis of all that is in a Shakespearean name is one model for what I am trying to do with the name Innogen.

10. Leonard Digges's tribute to Shakespeare, published in the 1640 Poems (London: John Benson) alludes to Much Ado in a way that makes Beatrice and Benedick its central attraction (Brian Vickers, ed., Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage 28). This allusion provides another way of rereading the play and giving it new emphases.

11. See Harry Berger's “Against the Sink-a-Pace: Sexual and Family Politics in Much Ado about Nothing” for more on hearing and its lapses in the play.

12. See “Unemending Shakespeare's Sonnet 111” 96.

13. My thanks to David Galef and Marcia Worth-Baker for rereading this essay many times and giving me a number of valuable suggestions.

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