SOURCE: “‘This Son of Yorke’: Textual and Literary Criticism Again,” in Shakespeare Quarterly 37, No. 3, Autumn, 1986, pp. 359-65.

[In the following essay, Hammersmith examines a textual crux in Richard III: that is, whether Shakespeare wrote “sun” or “son” of York in the opening lines of the play and whether the puns that result in either case make one reading more likely than the other.]

Perhaps it is time again to put in a word in favor of the exercise of literary judgment in coping with textual problems and in making editorial decisions, though G. Thomas Tanselle's lucid and persuasive essay on the need to combine literary and textual criticism appeared not so long ago that it should already have passed out of memory.¹ Still, the questions with which Tanselle grappled are complicated even further when a scholarly editor undertakes to produce a modern reading edition of an early work, for the decisions made for an old-spelling edition must sometimes be re-thought for a modernized edition. I am persuaded that Tanselle's principles apply in both cases, but in that of a modernized edition the scale may have to be tipped even further in the direction of critical judgment. What I have in mind here is the problem of words which are both substantive variants and spelling variants in early modern English. I plan to argue a specific case, namely that it is impossible, in a modernized edition, to know what to do with all the “sons” and “suns” in the texts of Richard III on the basis of “pure” textual principles, and, moreover, that without resort to literary principles the decisions reached for an old-spelling edition will not only mislead the reader of a modernized text but will misrepresent Shakespeare as well.

The example I propose to set forth is a complicated one because the textual history of Richard III is itself complex. Nevertheless, while acknowledging that various details are still debatable, we can say that the prevailing view of the textual transmission, in outline form, is that summarized by G. Blakemore Evans in The Riverside Shakespeare.² According to Evans, the six quartos which preceded the Folio text of 1623 were printed in a simple series, each descending from the immediately preceding edition. F1 “was printed partly from Q3 and partly from Q6, the copy of Q6 having been corrected against an independent manuscript,” which Evans thinks was “possibly Shakespeare's ‘foul papers’, but in any case almost certainly not a manuscript with theatrical connections.” The upshot of this state of affairs is that F1 must be the copy-text for the whole play except for III.i.1-158 and V.iii.48 to the end, which portions were set from Q3; for those parts, Q1 is the copy-text, “since Q3 is essentially nothing but a twice-removed reprint of Q1.” The texts of editorial concern, then, are Q1, Q6, and F1. Thus much is widely agreed upon, and it shall suffice for my purposes here.

In his New Arden edition of Richard III,³ Antony Hammond sets forth editorial principles which I mean to quote at some length in order to discuss what happens when textual principles are applied so rigorously that they do violence to the literary design of the play. He explains that “much recent textual theory assumes that an ‘old-spelling’ edition is being prepared” but that “this aspect of the theory has only incidental bearing on the production of a modernized edition such as the Arden. The principle that one chooses the copy-text on the basis of its superior accidentals does not apply to a modernized edition in which most accidental features, especially spelling and punctuation, are altered” (p. 50). One might well quarrel with the way this is put, since the choice of the copytext of any edition is based on the superiority of the accidentals, which afterward get “altered” in a modernized text, but as that is what Hammond does in practice, all is well so far. He bases his text on F1, “as the text of superior authority,” but he acknowledges that “every reading in which Q differs from F must be evaluated, since any such difference may originate with Shakespeare, or perhaps have his sanction.” Still, “most such variants are actors’ or compositors' errors, and will be rejected …” (p. 50). In the Arden edition punctuation and spelling are modernized because “we have passed safely through the period when scholars believed that the pointing of F was Shakespeare’s, and the subsequent period when it was held that, while not Shakespeare’s, at least the punctuation of early editions was rhetorical in intent, and thus served the function of a sort of stage-directions, indicating to the actor how to speak the lines” (p. 51). Thus, punctuation, though sometimes a delicate and subtle matter, can be normalized fairly routinely, and spellings offer only slightly greater difficulties: “While there is a greater chance of copy-spellings surviving into print than there is of copy-punctuation, it is well to remember Trevor Howard-Hill's caveat: all spellings in the printed text are compositorial. There can thus be no more reason for preferring F's punctuation to that of any other text than there would be for retaining its spellings” (p. 52). Hence, Hammond chooses “a modern spelling … if one exists” (p. 53), though of course no modern equivalent exists for some archaic words, such as “Iwis,” in which case the old word must be retained.

I wish to take up this last principle of spelling because textual authority, principles of modernization, and literary criticism collide head-on in several spelling problems in Richard III. To begin at the beginning, the opening four lines of the play read as follows in Q1 (1597):

Now is the winter of our discontent,
Made glorious summer by this sonne of Yorke:
And all the cloudes that lowrd vpon our house,
In the deepe bosome of the Ocean buried.

(I.i.1-4)

In the second line we have remarkable concord between Q1-Q6 and F1, all of which give some o form of “sonne” rather than a u form.⁴ As F1 is the copytext for this part of the play, an editor would print F's “Made glorious Summer by this Son of Yorke” without alteration; in a modernized edition, however, the triple pun in “Son of Yorke” poses some problems, for one must decide which meaning is primary—“son” or “sun”—before rendering the word in modern English. The trouble, of course, is that “sonne” is both a variant spelling of “sunne” (or of “sun”) and a word in its own right, meaning “male offspring,” and that both meanings apply in this context. As Tanselle says, the editor's “goal must necessarily be the recovery of the words which the author actually wrote” (p. 209). The question in this case is: is “sonne” a word—“son”—or is it a spelling variant of another word—“sun”? The words in this part of the text are likely to be Shakespeare’s, but the spellings are likely to be compositorial. The authority of F's “Son” is therefore dependent upon one's judgment concerning its status as a substantive or as an accidental feature.

Hammond prints “son” and explains in his note to the line: “Despite QF concurrence in the spelling, virtually all eds (though not Evans) have followed Rowe's emendation ‘sun’ to give point to the pun: Edward IV assumed the device of a sun as his emblem in consequence of the vision of three suns which appeared to him during the battle of Mortimer's Cross (see 3H6, II.i.21-40).” “Evans” is, of course, G. Blakemore Evans, who first printed “sun” in his edition for the Pelican Shakespeare, changed it to “son” in the revised edition,⁵ and retained the latter in the Riverside edition. What I wish to argue is that before an editor prints anything here, he or she must first decide whether a spelling variant or a substantive variant is at issue and that the matter cannot be decided without employing literary criticism. Tanselle maintains that an editor “must examine both the author's intention to use a particular word and the author's intention to mean a particular thing in the work as a whole—indeed, must make decisions about the first in light of the second” (p. 175), with the result that “one is inevitably drawn back to the work itself as the most reliable documentary evidence as to what the author intended” (p. 177). He goes on to explain how the two methods, textual and literary, and the part and whole function together: “The scholarly editor will amass all the evidence he can find bearing on each textual decision; but, when the factual evidence is less than incontrovertible, his judgment about each element will ultimately rest on his interpretation of the author's intended meaning as he discovers it in the whole of the text itself” (p. 183). Now, in the case in point, the reading would be incontrovertible if the word in question were not a possible spelling variant as well as a possible substantive variant. The issue is almost paradoxical because swords don't come more double-edged than this one: it is not a problem in an old-spelling edition precisely because the spelling variant is possible, but it is a problem in a modernized text for exactly the same reason. In practice this means that the editor of an old-spelling edition has the easier job of it, for, recognizing that the same spelling carries multiple meanings in early modern English, he or she need not decide which meaning is primary. The textual authority ends the matter. The accidental feature does not interfere with the substantive issue. For the modernizing editor, on the other hand, reliance on the authority of the text seems to me to violate the plain meaning Shakespeare has put into Richard's mouth—and there is other evidence of a textual nature to indicate that this is so.

Within the intention of the opening lines and within the intention of the play as a whole, the word “son” cannot be the word Shakespeare meant to be primary in the second line of the play. We are faced here with multiple meanings, but “regardless of how many meanings he finds in the text, the scholarly editor makes corrections or emendations on the basis of the one he judges most likely to have been the author's intended meaning” (Tanselle again, p. 181). That “son” is an intended meaning here is beyond question, but it is just one of three intended meanings, all of which inhere in the old spelling but only one of which is represented in the modern spelling. Hence, in presenting a pun to a modern reader the editor must look first to the primary sense from which the secondary senses are derived.

We can solve this particular problem in context only by tracing the process by which we come to understand the meaning of the lines. Since the lines are figurative, “son” will not serve as the primary meaning without undermining the vehicle of the metaphor. The tenor is that the son (Edward) of Richard, 3d. Duke of York, has by his ascension to the throne dispelled the discontent of the house of York (winter, clouds) and has ushered in a period (summer) during which the house may flourish. The vehicle, however, the sense by which we may arrive at the tenor, says that winter has been transformed into summer by the heat of the sun, which has also driven away the wintry clouds. Hence, we must first understand the sense “sun” if the metaphor is to be intelligible. That is the primary sense, which then passes into yet another meaning of “sun,” namely the emblem adopted by Edward IV. Finally, it is only through the sense of the emblem that we may identify Edward as the “son” of Richard, Duke of York. Consequently, the form printed by Evans and Hammond is actually the tertiary sense, which cannot be arrived at without first understanding the two precedent senses which depend, for Elizabethan and modern readers alike, upon the sense “sun.” The textual problem is that “sun” could be spelled “son” in Elizabethan English but must be spelled “sun” in modern English. That is, a contemporary reader would have seen all the meanings in one spelling, but even that reader would have had to recognize the meaning “sun” as primary before the metaphor could yield up its richness of meaning.

The proof of the point is in the performance, during which this “problem” does not even exist, since an audience of any century hears but the one sound. The question is how to represent the theatrical experience in print. What an audience hears is the collocation of “winter,” “summer,” “sun,” “clouds.” The metaphor is calculated to inspire a listener to hear “sun” before “son,” and, indeed, only thus can the secondary and tertiary meanings emerge. In the case of alternatives, all editorial work involves choices, and “these decisions are based both on whatever external evidence is available and on the editor's judgment as to how the author was most likely to have expressed himself at any given point” (Tanselle, p. 173). The editor must ask whether it is likely that Shakespeare wrote lines which seem to say that winter has been transformed into summer by York's offspring when just a micro-meaning away is the sense that winter has been transformed into summer by the sun. To insist on the former because the quartos and the Folio agree in a spelling which is ambiguous and interchangeable and which may not be Shakespeare's at all (“all spellings in the printed text are compositorial”) is to give a modern reader an experience which no theatrical audience anywhere at any time could have had.

That Shakespeare is “most likely to have expressed himself” with “sun” rather than “son” in the second line of the play is borne out by the evidence of the rest of the text. Richard III is filled with sons and suns, and neither Q1 nor F1 ever spells with a u if “son” is unequivocally meant. But here is the Q1 version of Richard's response to Anne's threat to tear her cheeks with her fingernails:

These eies could neuer indure sweet beauties wrack,
You should not blemish them if I stood by:
As all the world is cheered by the sonne,
So I by that, it is my day, my life.

(I.ii.127-30)

Q2 follows Q1 in spelling with an o in line 129; the compositor of Q3 altered it to “sunne,” in which the rest of the quartos and F1 agree. A modernizing editor would print “sun,” the reading of the copy-text, but I doubt that the editor would wish to argue that Q1 and Q2 are in error. What we have here is a spelling variant. The editor prints “sun” on substantive grounds, the fact that F1 spells with a u while Q1 and Q2 with an o being entirely accidental. To put it another way, a modern editor prints “sun” because that is manifestly what the word means in all the texts, and it is just this kind of line which confirms that in old spelling the two forms are indifferent. The agreement or disagreement of the quartos and the Folio in the particular spelling is altogether irrelevant to the modernizing editor's decision in this case.

The problem with the authority of the copy-text is that F1 is elsewhere consistent, using the o form for the sense “offspring” and the u form for the heavenly body. Such consistency would indeed appear to justify printing “son” in the second line of the play. F1 is, however, itself a derivative text. Even if the printer's or the compositors' intention was to regularize the spellings of Q6 and the manuscript, there is more than a slight possibility that an oversight occurred right off the bat in the opening lines. But we can judge the matter only by combining the textual evidence with literary judgment. That is, as Tanselle advises, we arrive at Shakespeare's likely intention in the second line by looking at his likely intentions elsewhere in the play. For example, when Richmond ponders the prospects of a successful battle, Q1 represents his first three lines this way:

The wearie sonne hath made a golden sete,
And by the bright tracke of his fierie Carre,
Giues signall of a goodlie day to morrow. …

(V.iii.19-21)

Q2 alters to the u spelling in line 19, to be followed by the rest of the quartos, F1, and Hammond, who has this note on the line: “The sun that rose on Richard's opening soliloquy now sets in favourable omen for Richmond; later (ll. 277-80) it will not rise for Richard. … Q1 compounds the allusion to I.i.2 by misspelling as ‘sonne’!” Given the treatment of the text, this is a very strange remark; one turns back to the second line of the play and looks in vain for “the sun that rose on Richard's opening soliloquy,” for there Hammond prints “son of York.” If the quibble is echoed in this later speech, it is hard to see why the o spelling is an error in one place but not in another. The compositor of Q2, after all, did no more here than a modern editor would do in changing “son” to “sun” in the opening soliloquy. That compositor had no textual authority for changing the spelling, and the line of transmission in both speeches is Q1-Q6 + MS-F1. The Q2 compositor simply used his critical judgment to point up the primary meaning, and the subsequent texts agree with him. As Tanselle says, when an erroneous word “does not make sense, and when the correct word is obvious, anyone who makes the correction is carrying out the author's intention” (p. 186). In this case we do not have a genuine “error” as such; we have rather an early modern English spelling variant which has become a modern substantive problem, but the principle is the same: the modernizing editor must print the author's likeliest intention. That is what Rowe did when he emended “Son of York” to “sun of York” upon no greater or lesser authority than did the compositor of Q2 in this later speech.

There are, moreover, two intermediate steps in this iterative quibbling on “son” and “sun,” one of which has not, as far as I am able to discover, been commented upon. The skeptical third citizen warns his neighbors to take precautions against the ravages of civil war when Edward IV dies, and his speech includes the same collocation that occurs in the opening lines; in Q1 his speech looks like this:

When cloudes appeare, wise men put on their clokes:
When great leaues fall, the winter is at hand:
When the sunne sets, who doth not looke for night:
Vntimely stormes, make men expect a darth. …

(II.iii.32-35)

F1 substitutes “are seen” for “appeare” in line 32 and treats “stormes” as a collective singular by printing “makes” in line 35, but it too spells “sun” and preserves the collocation: here we have the “clouds,” “winter,” and “sun” again, but rather than a “summer” we have an image of autumn, “when great leaues fall.” The metaphor is perhaps a bit mixed, but the sense of it and its relationship to the opening lines is clear enough: the sun (/son, Edward) has now set, and this metaphor shifts its focus to the seasonal context in order to point up the significance of “winter”; the sun/son which dispelled winter and ushered in the glorious summer has now vanished, giving prospect of another winter “at hand.” The identity of the lexical cohesion gives further point to Richmond's quibbling later: “The wearie sonne [sunne] hath made a golden sete,” in which case the sun/son is now Richard, who, far from promising glorious summer, has benighted the country and laid it waste as winter.

The main point here is that all the metaphors function in the same way; that is, they all depend for their import on the sense “sun” being primary. A final instance of the pun will clarify the textual issue. As Richard and Margaret exchange barbs in I.iii, Richard explains to her that the house of York “buildeth in the Cedars top, / And dallies with the winde, and scornes the sunne” (Q1, ll. 264-65), to which she replies, also in the Q1 version:

And turnes the sun to shade, alas, alas,
Witnes my son, now in the shade of death. …

(I.iii.266-67)

For “son” in line 267, Q5 and Q6 print “sunne,” and Hammond comments: “Margaret appropriates Richard's pun from I.i.2; the compositors of Q5-6 seem to have been bemused thereby, but F reverts to the earlier form; in a modernized text the distinction must be carefully made.” Indeed it must, but not on the basis of copy-text spellings alone. What is wanted in a modernized text is the primary meaning in each case. The facts that “son” and “sun” are sixteenth-century spelling variants and that the compositors decided the spellings in each specific case make the spellings in the copy-text a thoroughly unreliable guide to editorial decisions. We cannot say that at one point the compositors were bemused and at another point they misspelled, because they may have been utterly indifferent to the form of the word they set into type. At I.iii.266-67 the compositors spell so as to make the secondary sense primary to a modern reader, and modern editors do well to change it back, not because that is what F1 does but because that is what makes the passage intelligible to a reader today and because it surely represents Shakespeare's intention. The same must be said for Rowe's change to “sun” in the second line of the play.

To rely so heavily on the spellings in F1 that one misrepresents the primary sense of the word in Richard's opening soliloquy is to vitiate at the outset the whole point of the iterative imagery having to do with sons and suns. In a modernized text especially the textual evidence must be tempered with literary judgment to arrive at the author's intended meaning. In the cases of the sons and suns of Richard III one would do well to treat all the spellings as accidental and to base one's substantive decisions on the documentary evidence of the meaning of the text as a whole.

Notes

1. G. Thomas Tanselle, “The Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention,” Studies in Bibliography, 29 (1976), 167-211.

2. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), p. 754. Evans provides a bibliography on the subject, briefly annotated to indicate the points of dispute. The line numbers I cite refer to his text.

3. (London and New York: Methuen, 1981).

4. The information on readings is based on Hammond's collations, checked against Kristian Smidt, ed., The Tragedy of King Richard III: Parallel Texts of the First Quarto and the First Folio with Variants of the Early Quartos (New York: Humanities Press, 1969). The quarto I cite is W. W. Greg’s, No. 12 in the Shakespeare Quarto Facsimiles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), checked against that in Michael J. B. Allen and Kenneth Muir, eds., Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981). Folio readings are checked against The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare, ed. Charlton Hinman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968).

5. The Tragedy of Richard III (Baltimore: Penguin, 1959); the same in Alfred Harbage, gen. ed., William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969).