Cranach Press Hamlet

On my last post about woodcuts, I promised some beautiful twentieth-century ones, so here you are:This is the opening to a German book arts press edition of Hamlet, printed in 1928 by Count Harry Kessler's Cranach Press in Weimar. The book consists of Gerhart Hauptman's translation of the second quarto of Shakespeare's play, surrounded by the relevant source texts of Saxo Grammaticus and Francois de Belleforest. Throughout the book are beautiful woodcuts done specifically for this edition by Edward Gordon Craig. (A second version of this book, with the play in English, was printed in 1930.)

The Cranach Press Hamlet does a remarkable job of using the woodcuts not simply to illustrate but to interact with the text and to perform its meanings through shaping the look of page. Notice how the nervous guards huddle against the majuscule "W" in the opening scene, while the form of the Ghost lurks on the far right of the text. Or examine how the dumbshow preceding Hamlet's play is set off from the text just as the performance language of the dumbshow sets off the play-within-the-play and the performance of Hamlet itself. Here, the beautiful and mysterious players stand on top of the red text of the dumbshow--the only use of red ink in the playtext.

The most striking moment in the book, however, comes at Ophelia's death.

The crowd of spectators (those watchers who are omnipresent in the play) push against the solid walls that hold within them a rectangle of blue ink. Just barely visible in that blue is the white outline of Ophelia, walking away from the crowd.

It's a devastating scene that hits home because of its skillful mise-en-page.

In many ways, the Cranach Press Hamlet pays tribute to the power and beauty of early printed books. The typefont was designed by Edward Johnston after the fonts used by the German printers Fust and Schaeffer. And the layout of text surrounded by commentary mirrors that of early printings of classical and religious works. The use of woodcuts, too, is part of the reforming of early printed typography. And they are a powerful reminder of how much the layout of the printed page can effect our response to the work.

Hamlet's tables

In my last post, I mentioned Hamlet's practice of commonplacing, or recording things of note in his writing tablets. I want to return to Hamlet to look at commonplacing from a slightly different angle--not what is written, but what is written upon.

Below is the first part of the speech from which I quoted before. For context, you should know that Hamlet is speaking to himself after his first encounter with his father's ghost and during which the ghost exhorted Hamlet to "Remember me."

Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain
Unmixed with baser matter. . . . .
(Hamlet, Arden3, 1.5.95-104)

Hamlet's description of wiping away the records to clear the space for the commandment to remember his father has long been read as metaphorical. And there is much in the speech that invites us to read it as a metaphor: Hamlet describes his brain as a book wherein memory inscribes itself.

But Hamlet's reference to writing tables that can be erased is also quite literal. In a marvellous essay in Shakespeare Quarterly is a full account of how erasable tablets were made, who used them, and where we can find surviving examples. One survivor is in the Folger's collection, a copy of Robert Triplet's Writing Tables with a Kalender for xxiiii. yeeres (London, 1604). Below is an image of that volume held open to a set of pages treated to be erasable.

The pages were treated with a coating of gesso and glue, and written on with a metal stylus. In this example, you can see how the coating has crumbled over the years, with the top, harder layer remaining in some places (revealing a recipe for treating horses), while along the edges, the under, spongier layer is now visible.

It is worth noting, too, the size of the tables: small, and easily portable. What else makes this a portable tablet, as opposed to other, non-portable writing surfaces? Writing with quill and ink requires many more tools: quill, inkpot, a hard surface, paper, a quill knife, perhaps some blotting material. How could Hamlet--or an actor playing Hamlet--possibly carry so much equipment and stop to write with it? The only other tool required for these tablets is a stylus, and many surviving examples of the tables have evidence of a stylus having been attached directly to them, or kept within the binding.

Once again, the technologies of writing and the materiality of text shape what we can create. With erasable tablets, a scholar could note in his tables whatever he or she wanted to include in a commonplace book, transfer those notes to the book, and then wipe clear the table to be used again. Hamlet's juxtaposition of the table able to be wiped clean and the "book and volume of my brain" in which the Ghost's commandment will be inscribed enacts the practice of commonplacing that we have been considering.

For more information on erasable tablets, see Peter Stallybrass, Roger Chartier, J. Franklin Mowery, and Heather Wolfe, "Hamlet's Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England, " Shakespeare Quarterly, 55 (2004): 379-419.

commonplacing

At tea on Friday (the Folger heartily endorses everyone in the Library to stop for 3:00 tea--a great practice that is fruitful in ways beyond caffeine intake) with a couple of friends, I was struck by some of the oddities of blogging. Marshall Grossman was talking about the blog he writes for the Huffington Post, and about how bits of his blog crop up all over the blogosphere. Blogs are tremendously self-replicating that way: lots of them consist primarily of quotes from and links to other blogs.

Marshall was talking about how disconcerting it is to see his name and his words show up marshalled to the service of someone else's agenda. That, of course, is true for print essays as well--we all take other scholars' insights and use them to help shape our own. But what struck me is how much easier that it with blogs. You just cut-and-paste and there it is! Right now, I'm working in "compose" mode in Blogger, and there's a button with a double-quotation mark on it that will automatically format what I select into a block quotation. It's like they knew people were doing it all the time!

What this conversation made me realize was how much today's blogging is like early modern commonplacing. You copy down pithy sayings, observations, facts, and whatever else strikes you and collect them into your notebook. In the early modern period, copying them down was often only the first step; after that you would transfer them into another book, this time organized under subject headings. Hamlet does it:

O villain, villain, smiling damned villain,
My tables! Meet it is I set it down
That one may smile and smile and be a villain
(1.5.106-108)*

The tables Hamlet refers to are a writing tablet in which he literally notes this commonplace. Commonplacing is a Renaissance practice and habit of thought that you can find in traces throughout the period's writings.

It turns out that my recognition of a link between blogging and commonplacing is, well, a commonplace. It's even in Wikipedia's entry on commonplacing. How banal is that? Less banal is this tumblelog, Commonplacing, which uses short quotes and a layout of boxes juxtaposing quotations.**

But while the recognition of all this ease of assembling quotes into a blog or a commonplace book might have been noticed, less commented on is my second observation: The ease with which the technology of cutting-and-pasting and of pre-formatted WSIWYG editing choices enable bloggers to take other people's words and incorporate them into their own blog, and in so doing, to essentially assume ownership of those words.

And this is what strikes me as the real connection between blogging and commonplacing. One of the disconcerting things, to a modern student, in looking at many early modern commonplace books, is that they do not tend to record the names of sources. A writer will commonplace a sonnet, but not the name of the poet. Put into a personal commonplace book, that poem becomes part of the property and identity of the transcriber, not the author. It's a very different conception of ownership of text: today, that would be plagiarism, would it not? Haven't politicians seen their candidacies fail for such things?

What I am describing is not plagiarism, but a different conception of the relationship between writer and written, one that is looser, one in which the written words do not stay firmly tied to one writer. For bloggers, the very medium in which we write encourages this perambulation and the technology that we use to shape our message builds into itself this commonplacing of ideas.



*I am quoting from the edition of Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor for the Arden Shakespeare (2006). There's much more to be said about this edition and about how editions matter when we're talking about Shakespeare, and especially about Hamlet.

**What's a tumblelog? Here's Wikipedia: "A tumblelog (also known as a tlog or tumblog) is a variation of a blog that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, tumblelogs are frequently used to share the author's creations, discoveries, or experiences while providing little or no commentary." (You can tell I'm old-school because I give you the definition instead of just linking to it.)