Shakespeare and the art of revision

Note: I’m taking the day off, so I’m republishing a piece from earlier in this blog’s run. This post originally appeared, in a slightly different form, on April 22, 2016.

When we think of William Shakespeare, we don’t tend to see him as an author who meticulously revised his work. His reputation as a prodigy of nature, pouring out raw poetry onto the page, owes a lot to Ben Jonson’s short reminiscence of his friend, which is still the most valuable portrait we have of how Shakespeare seemed to those who knew him best:

I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, “Would he had blotted a thousand,” which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance, who chose that circumstance to commend their friend by wherein he most faulted; and to justify mine own candor, for I loved the man, and do honor his memory on this side idolatry as much as any. He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent fancy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped…His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so too…But he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned.

And even Shakespeare’s admirers admit that his sheer imaginative fertility—the greatest of any writer who ever lived—led him to produce bad lines as well as good, often side by side. (My favorite example is the last stanza of “The Phoenix and the Turtle.” I don’t think it’s possible to read “For these dead birds sigh a prayer” as anything other than one of the worst lines of poetry ever written.)

But he did revise, both on the overarching levels of character and theme and on the level of the individual line. Harold Bloom, among others, has advanced the ingenious theory that the lost Ur-Hamlet, which we know only through offhand references by contemporaries, was nothing less than an early draft by the young Shakespeare himself. We know that it wasn’t particularly good: the author Thomas Lodge refers to the king’s ghost crying “Hamlet, revenge!” in a way that implies that it became a running joke among theatergoers. But the idea that Shakespeare went back and revised it so many years later is inherently revealing. We know that the story was personally meaningful to him—he named his own son after Hamlet—and that the lost version would have been one of the first plays he ever wrote. And Hamlet itself, when we read it in this light, looks a lot like a play that found its final form through repeated acts of revision. F. Scott Fitzgerald once called himself a “taker-outer,” while his friend Thomas Wolfe was a “putter-inner,” which prompted Wolfe to reply:

You say that the great writer like Flaubert has consciously left out the stuff that Bill or Joe will come along presently and put in. Well, don’t forget, Scott, that a great writer is not only a leaver-outer but also a putter-inner, and that Shakespeare and Cervantes and Dostoevsky were great putter-inners—greater putter-inners, in fact, than taker-outers and will be remembered for what they put in—remembered, I venture to say, as long as Monsieur Flaubert will be remembered for what he left out.

And Hamlet stands as the one instance in which Shakespeare, while revising the first draft, put in everything he wanted, even if the result was close to unplayable on stage.

There’s an even more compelling glimpse of Shakespeare the reviser, and it comes in the unlikely form of Timon of Athens, which, by all measure, was the weirdest play he ever wrote. Scholars have attributed its stranger qualities—the loose ends, the characters who are introduced only to disappear for no reason—to a collaboration between Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton, and textual analysis seems to bear this out. But it also looks like a rough draft that Shakespeare never had a chance to revise, and if we take it as a kind of snapshot of his creative process, it’s a document of unbelievable importance. In the speech by the servant that I’ve reproduced above, you can see that it starts out as prose, then shifts halfway through to verse, a peculiar transition that occurs repeatedly in Timon but has few parallels in the other plays. This suggests that Shakespeare began by roughing out large sections of the play in prose form, and then went back to convert it into poetry. Timon just happens to be the one play in which the process of revision was interrupted, leaving the work in an unfinished state. It implies that Shakespeare’s approach wasn’t so different from the one that I’ve advocated here in the past: you write an entire first draft before going back to polish it, just as a painter might do a sketch or cartoon of the whole canvas before drilling down to the fine details. It isn’t until you’ve written a story that you know what it’s really about. And the little that we know about Shakespeare’s methods seems to confirm that he followed this approach.

But his revisions didn’t end there, either. These plays were meant for performance, and like all theatrical works, they evolved in response to rehearsals, the needs of the actors, and the reactions of the audience. (The natural fluidity of the text on the stage goes a long way toward explaining why certain plays, like King Lear, exist in radically different versions in folio or quarto form. Some scholars seem bewildered by the fact that Shakespeare could be so indifferent to his own work that he didn’t bother to finalize a definitive version of Lear, but it may not have even struck him as a problem. The plays took different shapes in response to the needs of the moment, and Shakespeare, the ultimate pragmatist, knew that there was always more where that came from.) And the idea of ongoing revision is inseparable from his conception of the world. Bloom famously talks about Shakespearean characters “overhearing” themselves, which lies at the center of his imaginative achievement: figures like Richard II and Hamlet seem to listen to themselves speaking, and they evolve and deepen before our eyes in response to what they hear in their own words. But what Bloom calls “the depiction of self-change on the basis of self-overhearing” is a lesson that could only have come out of the revision process, in which the writer figures out his own feelings through the act of rewriting. As E.M. Forster wrote in Aspects of the Novel: “How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?” Shakespeare knew this, too. And thanks to his work—and his revisions—we can echo it in our own lives: “How can we know who we are until we hear what we think?”

Quote of the Day

As brevity is the soul of wit, form, it seems to me, is the heart of humor and the salvation of comedy. “You are a putter in, and I am a taker out,” Scott Fitzgerald once wrote to Thomas Wolfe. Fitzgerald was not a master of comedy, but in his dedication to taking out, he stated the case for form as against flow.

—James Thurber, Lanterns & Lances

Shakespeare and the art of revision

When we think of William Shakespeare, we don’t often see him as a writer who meticulously revised his own work. His reputation as a prodigy of nature, pouring out poetry unaltered onto the page, owes a lot to Ben Jonson’s short reminiscence of his friend, which is still the most valuable portrait we have of how he seemed to those who knew him best:

I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, “Would he had blotted a thousand,” which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance, who chose that circumstance to commend their friend by wherein he most faulted; and to justify mine own candor, for I loved the man, and do honor his memory on this side idolatry as much as any. He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent fancy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped…His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so too…But he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned.

And even Shakespeare’s admirers have to admit that his sheer imaginative fertility—the greatest of any writer who ever lived—led him to produce bad lines as well as good, often side by side. (My favorite example is the ending of “The Phoenix and the Turtle”: I don’t think it’s possible to read “For these dead birds sigh a prayer” as anything other than one of the worst lines of poetry ever written.)

But he did revise, both on the overarching levels of character and theme and on the level of the individual line. Harold Bloom, among others, has advanced the ingenious theory that the lost Ur-Hamlet, which we know only through passing references by contemporaries, was nothing less than an early draft by the young Shakespeare himself. We know that it wasn’t particularly good: the author Thomas Lodge refers to the king’s ghost crying “Hamlet, revenge!” in a way that implies that it became a running joke among theatergoers. But the idea that Shakespeare went back and revised it so many years later is revealing in itself. We know that the story was personally meaningful to him—he named his own son after Hamlet—and that the lost version would have been one of the first plays he ever wrote. And Hamlet itself, when we read it in this light, looks a lot like a play that found its final form through repeated acts of revision. F. Scott Fitzgerald once called himself a “taker-outer,” while his friend Thomas Wolfe was a “putter-inner,” which prompted Wolfe to reply:

You say that the great writer like Flaubert has consciously left out the stuff that Bill or Joe will come along presently and put in. Well, don’t forget, Scott, that a great writer is not only a leaver-outer but also a putter-inner, and that Shakespeare and Cervantes and Dostoevsky were great putter-inners—greater putter-inners, in fact, than taker-outers and will be remembered for what they put in—remembered, I venture to say, as long as Monsieur Flaubert will be remembered for what he left out.

And Hamlet stands as the one instance in which Shakespeare, in revision, put in everything he wanted, even if the result was close to unplayable on stage.

There’s an even more compelling glimpse of Shakespeare the reviser, and it comes in the unlikely form of Timon of Athens, which, by all measure, was the weirdest play he ever wrote. Scholars have attributed its stranger qualities—the loose ends, the characters who are introduced only to disappear for no reason—to a collaboration between Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton, and textual analysis seems to bear this out. But it also looks like a rough draft that Shakespeare never had a chance to revise, and if we take it as a kind of snapshot of his creative process, it’s a document of unbelievable importance. In the speech by the servant that I’ve reproduced above, you can see that it starts out as prose, then shifts halfway through to verse, a peculiar transition that occurs repeatedly in Timon but has few parallels in the other plays. This suggests that Shakespeare began by roughing out large sections of the play in prose form, and then went back to convert it into poetry. Timon just happens to be the one play in which the process of revision was interrupted, leaving the work in an unfinished state. It implies that Shakespeare’s approach wasn’t so different from the one that I’ve advocated here in the past: you write an entire first draft before going back to polish it, just as a painter might do a sketch or cartoon of the whole canvas before drilling down to the fine details. It isn’t until you’ve written a story in its entirety that you know what it’s really about. And the little we know about Shakespeare’s methods seems to confirm this.

But his revisions didn’t end there, either. These plays were meant for performance, and like all theatrical works, they evolved in response to rehearsals, the needs of the actors, and the reactions of the audience. (The natural fluidity of the text on the stage goes a long way toward explaining why certain plays, like King Lear, exist in radically different versions in folio or quarto form. Some scholars seem bewildered by the fact that Shakespeare could be so indifferent to his own work that he didn’t bother to finalize a definitive version of Lear, but I’m not sure if it even struck him as a problem. The plays took different shapes in response to the needs of the moment, and Shakespeare, the ultimate pragmatist, knew that there was always more where that came from.) And the idea of ongoing revision is inseparable from his conception of the world. Bloom famously talks about Shakespearean characters “overhearing” themselves, which lies at the center of his imaginative achievement: figures like Richard II and Hamlet seem to listen to themselves speaking, and they evolve and deepen before our eyes in response to what they hear in their own words. But what Bloom calls “the depiction of self-change on the basis of self-overhearing” is a lesson that could only have come out of the revision process, in which the writer figures out his own feelings in the act of rewriting. As E.M. Forster wrote in Aspects of the Novel: “How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?” Shakespeare knew this, too. And thanks to his work—and his revisions—we can echo it in our own lives: “How can we know who we are until we hear what we say?”

Quote of the Day

Will you please have Mr. Darrow send me a statement of whatever money is due me? [After reading the reviews for Look Homeward, Angel] I shall not write any more books, and since I must begin to make other plans for the future, I should like to know how much money I will have.

—Thomas Wolfe, in a letter to Maxwell Perkins

What do you do with twenty-five books?

Yesterday, I finally received the promised delivery of twenty-five contractual copies of The Icon Thief, which took me overnight from regarding my few author’s copies as the most precious things in the world to having more copies of my book than I’ll ever need. I’m not alone in this, of course: every author I’ve ever met has had a box or two of his or her own books on hand, or a whole bookcase taken up with that single title, like the Da Vinci Code shelf at your local thrift store. (As David Thomson says of his insane, widely derided, and oddly compelling study of Nicole Kidman: “I have fortress walls made of it.” Similarly, the biographer Michael Holroyd describes seeing “a long tall corridor that had been built entirely out of unsold copies of my books,” which he calls “an impressive, an undeniable spectacle.”)

So what do authors do with their own books? Ideally, if you’re of a certain temperament, you want to end up with a library like that of Isaac Asimov, who initially kept all the editions of his books, including translations, but finally ran out of room for anything but the English-language originals (and had to throw away the non-Asimov pages from magazines in which his work appeared). All the same, there’s a limit to the amount of space you have for your own work, at least until you can sell all of it to the University of Texas. Any prolific author will inevitably end up with more books than he needs, and may be tempted to shout to his publisher, like James Thurber in his story “File and Forget”: “I don’t want any more copies of my book. I don’t want any more copies of my book. I don’t want any more copies of my book.”

Of course, the best thing to do with spare copies of one’s own book is to send them around to various influential readers. Even the greatest authors have done this, as we see in a letter by Charles Darwin to Thomas Huxley:

Can you tell me of any good and speculative foreigners to whom it would be worth while to send copies of my book, on the ‘Origin of Species’?…I should like to send a few copies about, but how many I can afford I know not yet till I hear what price Murray affixes.

Emerson, among countless others, made sure that copies of his books were sent to all the important New York editors, listing each one by name, while Aleister Crowley eventually took over the job of selling the unsold copies of his books himself, and indignantly noted, against the rumors circulating in London, that his decision to leave his publisher “had nothing at all to do with the strangling of any woman.” (I know that this last story is a little off-topic, but I couldn’t resist.)

As for my own copies, I’ll keep a few around the house, one to read, one for the archives in a mylar bag, and a couple of spares for emergencies. I owe copies to a number of people thanked in the acknowledgments, including those who kindly read earlier versions of the novel. As for the rest, they’ll probably end up in various hands, maybe even yours, if I ever get around to figuring out some kind of giveaway. (But don’t let that stop you from buying your own copy, just in case.) In the meantime, though, it’s nice to see them all lined up in one place, before they wander off to make their way in the world, and in this respect, if no other, I feel a little like Thomas Wolfe, who stared at copies of his first book in a store window so intently that somebody called the police.

What I read when I’m writing

When Norman Mailer was writing The Naked and the Dead, the novel that made him famous at age twenty-five, he had a simple method for getting ready to work in the morning. Mailer says:

I had four books on my desk all the time I was writing: Anna Karenina, Of Time and the River, U.S.A., and Studs Lonigan. And whenever I wanted to get in the mood to write I’d read one of them. The atmosphere of The Naked and the Dead, the overspirit, is Tolstoyan; the rococo comes out of Dos Passos; the fundamental, slogging style from Farrell, and the occasional overrich descriptions from Wolfe.

And Mailer isn’t the only writer who kept a few favorite books on his desk. I imagine that many novelists have books that they keep at the ready for when they feel inspiration starting to flag. Sometimes it’s the same book over the course of an entire career; more often, I suspect, it varies from project to project. In my own case, I start each writing day by reading a few pages of a book that embodies the tone or voice I’m trying to achieve—as if something of the author’s talent will magically transmit itself—and return to it more than once as I continue to work. And rather to my surprise, when it comes to the novels I read while writing, I find myself sticking to a limited, strictly defined circle of books.

As I mentioned yesterday, I generally do a fast, rough draft of an entire chapter first thing in the morning, which usually takes a couple of hours. I’ve found from experience that the best books to read while I’m doing that messy initial version are rich, ripe, stylistically powerful books that encourage my own writing to be a little more florid—qualities that I pare down relentlessly in subsequent revisions, but which are often good to have in a first draft, where the point is to get as many ideas or images onto the page as possible. For me, the ideal author for this purpose is John Updike. Our styles as writers couldn’t be more different, but something in his ornate sentences just puts my brain to work. (It’s the Heist school of writing: I imagine a writer better than I am, then figure out what he would do.)

At the moment, then, I’m starting each morning with a few pages of Updike’s Terrorist. Later in the day, though, when I’m polishing what I’ve already written, I feel that it’s a mistake to read something so dense and mannered, because I run the risk of ending up with mere self-indulgence (a quality to which even Updike himself isn’t immune). For later drafts, it’s better to go with an author whose prose is a little more restrained, clean, and elegant—someone like Ian McEwan, say. While writing Kamera, I worked my way through Atonement, Amsterdam, Saturday, The Innocent, Black Dogs, and The Comfort of Strangers. Right now, since I’ve already read all the McEwan I own, I’m doing something similar with Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, which has the kind of spare, classical style that I’m hoping will restrain the worst of my impulses.

There’s a negative side to all this, too. While I’m writing, I avoid books that I think will noticeably infect my style, for better or worse. This includes bad books, of course, but also good novels where the author’s style clashes with mine. I also try to avoid books in translation, reasoning that it’s better to read books by great stylists who originally wrote in my own language. The problem? Since I’m always writing, my reading for the past few years has been extremely constrained. I haven’t read Cloud Atlas, for instance, because I’m afraid of being overly influenced by it, and because I don’t want to read anything in translation, I haven’t gotten around to Mario Vargas Llosa, among many others.

Obviously, this state of affairs can’t stand: as much as I like Updike and McEwan, I don’t want to be stuck with them for the rest of my life. And reading and being influenced by radically different authors is an important part of growing as a novelist. At some point, then, I’ll probably need to rethink this approach. (Although not until I finish this draft.)

Quote of the Day

Writing is easy. Just put a piece of paper in the typewriter and start bleeding.

—Thomas Wolfe