This spring, by chance, I acquired the last one-volume Yale Shakespeare from the Yale Bookstore: eight pounds of Shakespeare, one foot high and three inches thick, printed on modest paper and bound in cream-colored cloth. It's a reprint -- a collation really -- of a Shakespeare series that was respected in its day, though its day was long ago. The original Yale editions of Shakespeare's plays and poems were published by the Yale University Press from 1917 through 1927 and revised in the 1940s and 50s. The one-volume version, like the Yale Bookstore itself, is a Barnes & Noble franchise dating from the 90s; it was printed by the bookstore chain in 1993.
Yale's Shakespeare editions followed the lead of an early twentieth-century British movement "to reconceive what a Shakespeare text should be by going back to the originals," says Yale English professor Lawrence Manley. Previously, editors liked to improve on Shakespeare -- adding stage directions, turning prose into verse, and making other freewheeling contributions. As early practitioners of textual reconstitution, the Yale editors lacked the sophistication and body of research available to contemporary text analysts. But, Manley says, they "were, by their lights, trying to produce texts that were closer" to Shakespeare's.
Today the Yale Shakespeare is mostly a memento of an obsolete passage in Shakespeare scholarship. But it's also weighty evidence of the humanities tradition at Yale. This issue of the alumni magazine features a cri de coeur from Warren Goldstein '73, '83PhD, over the national state of liberal arts education, especially in the humanities. At Yale, however, the humanities are thriving. One has only to look at the Yale Shakespeare to know that part of the reason is historical: a school with its own Shakespeare edition has a solid humanities foundation to build on, and to live up to.
Goldstein posits that education in the humanities exposes students to a mode of thinking they can't learn in other fields, one that can guide them for the rest of their lives. Great humanities teachers also expose their students to wisdom. I took a Shakespeare lecture course one fall as an undergraduate, taught by a young professor named Roger Ferlo '79PhD. On the day of his Merchant of Venice lecture, Ferlo took the lectern a little more slowly than usual, looked at his waiting class a little longer than usual, and then said, grimly: "Happy New Year." It was Rosh Hashanah. He had inadvertently assigned The Merchant of Venice for one of the holiest days in the Jewish calendar, and he was visibly and audibly shaken by it.
Ferlo went on to argue that The Merchant of Venice is a play whose vicious anti-Semitism cannot be escaped or excused -- even though the anti-Semitism coexists with the transcendent, in Shylock's "Do we not bleed?" soliloquy. He argued, too, that The Merchant of Venice draws its power in part from its very anti-Semitism. The play is a great work of literature whose meaning depends on an act of intellectual violence by its author.
It was a lesson in the complex, nuanced, and sometimes profoundly contradictory nature of human beings. I've never forgotten it; I'm still learning from it. I'm grateful to Roger Ferlo, and I'm proud to own, in tribute to the Yale humanities tradition, the last Yale Shakespeare from the Yale Bookstore. 