"I only stole it"

"I only stole it," is Burbage's defensive reply to Shakespeare's complaint that Henslowe has not been paying him for his work.  And that's probably just what Burbage had done.  We're still quite a ways off from anything resembling copyright laws; acting companies frequently pirated works by rival companies.

Of course, they couldn't just go to the library and check out a play to perform, and the playwrights certainly weren't circulating copies of their work.  And there certainly were no Kinko's handy.

So companies used a number of different methods of "obtaining" copies of rivals' plays.  One of the most common method was for the entire company to go see a prospective play, each actor committing a part to memory.  Afterwards, they would sit down together and transcribe the play.

Of course, it's a bit difficult to memorize something that you've heard just the one time.  So more often than not, the resulting versions of the play were a bit different.  Take, for example, this version of the dreaded "To be, or not to be" soliloquy (the text is from a facsimile reprinted in Russ McDonald's The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare; I've modernized the spelling somewhat):

To be, or not to be, I, there's the point,
To Die, to sleepe, is that all?  I, all:
No, to sleepe, to dreame, I marry there it goes,
For in that dreame of death, when we awake,
And borne before an everlasting Judge,
From whence no passenger ever returned,
The undiscovered country, at whole sight
The happy smile, and the accursed damned,
But for this, the joyful hope of this, 
Whol'd bear the scorns and flattery of the world
Scorned by the right rich, the rich cursed of the poor?
The widow being oppressed, the orphan wrong'd,
The task of hunger, or a tyrant's reign, 
And thousand more calamities besides,
To grunt and sweat under this weary life,
When that he may his full Quietus make,
With a bare bodkin, who would this endure,
But for a hope of something after death?
Which puzzles the brain and doth confound the sense,
Which makes us rather bear those evils we have,
Than flee to others we know not of.
I that, O this conscience makes cowards of us all,
Lady, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered.

The first time I heard this was in the dreaded Research Skills class in the Penn State grad program, and the entire class was all but in tears by the time Dr. Joukovsky finished.  But as you read it, it is easy to see what happened; someone was trying to reconstruct the speech from memory, and the result is sort like a poetic version of fifty-two card pickup.  They piece things together as best they can, and just fill in some extra words here and there (in this case, "I") to make the scansion work. 

What's truly scary, and also illuminating, is that this version of the soliloquy is taken from the First Quarto (1603), one of the earliest printed versions of the play we have.  But that was the nature of the publishing business--no copyright laws, and nothing to prevent someone from swiping your play and rewriting to their own ends.

This charming little feature of Elizabethan lore has been the source of much consternation for Shakespearean scholars, particularly in the endless quest for the elusive "authoritative text."  To give you an idea of just how bad the problem is, there something like forty different texts for Hamlet.  Some of these, like the source for the above quote, are pretty easy to spot.  But these versions, frequently referred to as "foul papers," still cause problems, because there's always the chance that somewhere in the midst of all the insanity there just might be one or two valid lines.  In addition, there's that fact that very frequently printers employed typesetters who were poorly educated, and often illiterate.

The result has been a highly specialized field of scholarship--textual criticism.  And believe me, the road to textual criticism is the road to madness, particularly once computers are added to the mix.  To give you an idea, one breakthrough in textual criticism occurred when scholars 1.  discovered that  a particular typesetter always made the same spelling/grammatical errors, and 2. identified that same typesetter as having set the type for one of Shakespeare's plays.  They can then go in and correct the typesetters mistakes, a mere 380 years after the fact, and thus move ever closer to that Holy Grail of textual criticism, an "authoritative text."

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