Theatre : Effects of shortening the plays of Shakespeare
Good old Will has been out of copyright for a very long time, which means that anyone can take a pair of scissors to his stage work and reissue it with impunity. It’s been going on since the Restoration. The motives of editors and rehashers are many and varied. Yet overall, Shakespeare is revered. Bardolatry, Bernard Shaw called its excesses.
As for cutting his plays, well, consider how lucky we are to have reproducible Shakespeare plays at all. In the great man’s day it was a strange notion to have plays from the common stage published for the benefit of future generations. Plays were for experiencing, by a largely illiterate audience, not for studying off the page. As far as the commoners’ playwrights were concerned, their work was ephemeral. For example, scholars have tried in vain to find any copies of plays by known authors such as Henry Chettle or Tom Watson: the plays just weren’t preserved. The picture is complicated by the common practice of writing in teams. Elizabethan playwriting evidently was somewhat akin to churning out scripts for an insatiable TV series. It must have been messy to work out who owned what.
