The Argument of Textual Authority in McDonald's "What is Your Text?"

I used to do theatre, so I was in a few Shakespeare plays, and the one thing that really stuck with me after reading this essay was how, even though I had directors who wanted to “stay true” to Shakespeare, as in do a “classical” interpretation of his play, I had one director who did not care about sticking true to the written play at all, but would move scenes around, change lines, get rid of lines, etc.; so what I got from the reading was that there is no such thing as staying true to Shakespeare. In fact, what the latter director did seems to be closer to what Shakespeare wanted than what my director who wanted to “stay true to the play” was doing. The idea of textual authority in Shakespeare's plays seems impossible not only because we do not know if what we are reading and acting out is exactly what Shakespeare wrote, but we don’t even know if it’s what he intended the play to read like or watch like. McDonald explains this as he writes that, “to a Renaissance playwright, ‘publication’ meant presentation of the work to the public on a stage; it did not necessarily imply preservation in the form of a printed book,” which is already interesting enough and something that I did not know about Shakespeare’s plays that I have read, but he further explains this point when he says that in giving a written, finished script to a theatrical company, a playwright “thus relinquished his rights to the play” (196). So it’s not necessarily that these ideas of authenticity of authorship and textual authority are unique to Shakespeare, but rather it seems that these “problems” were common among all playwrights up until a certain period of time. This also tells us that what is written down and preserved could possibly be not at all what Shakespeare had originally written.

What is incredibly important to remember about Shakespeare’s plays is that when we are reading them, we are not reading a novel whose final form is what the author intended, but rather, we are reading theatre. Basically when it comes to reading and interpreting Shakespeare, textual authority does not exist. McDonald explains that “at some point an editor must choose which reading of a line to print, and an actor must decide which word to speak” (210). Shakespeare was not the end-all decider of what his plays meant; it seems that he wanted them to be fluid in order for directors and actors to change them as they wanted for them to survive throughout time. For a professor to force students to stick to a strict interpretation of what is on the page in front of them is not only not what Shakespeare appeared to have wanted, but it’s just not reasonable because we do not know if what is written down today is what Shakespeare originally wrote (his “foul papers”) or if it’s a combination of Shakespeare’s ideas and what directors and actors over time have formed it to be. In addition, they could be a result of “memorial reconstruction,” which was an incredibly interesting component to the textual authority argument alongside his plays being theatre, not novels (202). This means that we should attempt to explore all possible interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays because we don’t know which interpretation could make the most interesting play.

What I gathered from McDonald’s article is that the idea of textual authority does not exist, and, without his foul papers, we have only a small idea of what Shakespeare truly wanted his plays to look like. In addition, because we lack his foul papers and have only nearly 500-year-old interpretations of his plays, our realm of interpretation should be far wider than what is written on the page and what scholars have written about the plays over the years. If all the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players, then we all, as players, have the right to interpret Shakespeare’s works as we please.