Entropy and Gatekeeping

4The concept of entropy derives from a thermodynamic law that provides an explanation for every system becoming reordered in a different form and at a different energetic level as the conditions around it change and it reacts to reach new stability. The methodological approach in this article considers a printed translation as an ordered linguistic system composed of words, meanings and senses and its entropy is something that a translator has no control over as the variants that affect it are out of his or her hands. Therefore, every printed translation will be affected, some more and some less than others, by modifications in the way we see language, criticism, authorship, dating, etc. The second concept, that of gatekeeping, is sometimes used when talking about publishing policies, and my use of the term is related to that context. However, here the overall interest lies in how the translator acts as a gatekeeper in the process, shaping the ways in which we perceive the author and the play through the translator’s sense or judgement. My approach here is distinct from the tendency to focus on potential new authors or on the policies of publishing houses—something that usually does not apply in the case of Shakespearean drama for instance, but which is relevant when it comes to his contemporaries or their collaborations.

Brazilian-Portuguese translations of Shakespeare and multiple authorship

7According to Will Sharpe (2013), one of the editors of the important RSC publication Shakespeare & Others: Collaborative Plays, collaboration might be the reason some plays are included in the famous First Folio of Shakespeare while others are left out. This works for omitted Shakespeare and Fletcher plays, such as Cardenio and Two Noble Kinsmen, as well as for cases such as Edward III and Pericles. However, the Folio does not tell the “whole truth about Shakespeare’s authorship” (Sharpe, 2014: 35), as some collaborative plays are left out, whereas others are included (ibid.), such as Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, Henry VIII and Henry VI Part I. To ignore collaboration is to overlook an essential aspect of theatre itself, as an art that is essentially collaborative. This is not to say that collaborative writing is the most important aspect and solo authorship does not matter. Both cohabit in Renaissance drama and lyrical quality cannot be asserted based only on the number of hands working on a play. Gary Taylor, an influential Shakespearean scholar, recently stated that “anyone interested in Shakespeare must care about collaboration” (Taylor, 2014a: 1) and this involves readers, translators, actors and directors.

8Over the last few years, there has been increasing editorial interest in translations that may work on the stage as they are usually more accessible to a great range of readers. It is not rare to find mentions of the concern for performatibility (how a translation will sound upon the stage without major arrangements) in modern Brazilian translations. However, as I have stated above and going back to the never-ending discussion on reading / staging, both kinds of translation will continue to exist, probably using the great variety of resources available for digital editions. Translations for the stage are thought-provoking because they are exceptions to the rule and they provide the general background to thinking about the early modern practices of authorship, such as collaboration, as opposed to post-Romantic approaches of a solitary genius author. In addition, these so-called translations for the stage might not fit most performative circumstances because productions may rely on a great range of interpretations and are subject to constraints of time and space, to name just two.

9The language of these translations for the stage destroys the barriers and the difficulties that old-fashioned language and excessively complicated idioms have posed for decades because it speaks in an understandable and effective way. In the case of collaborative works, new translations give new life to these plays, giving rise to more up-to-date discussions, such as those concerning collaboration, which might have been unavailable to translators in the past, easily explaining the reason for a different authorial perspective.

11Therefore, the way in which a translator engages with his or her critical material and the ongoing discussions concerning a specific play—including or not some material and ideas—might affect how the readership or possible audiences will react to the play. Gatekeeping involves the selection of the information available on the text and its criticism, which is actually framed within the final printed translation, usually found in the pre-textual section. Whether the selection is sufficient or up to date is another matter, as translations are also affected by a great number of variants, such as methodological approaches, the purpose of reading / acting, the language employed, the play’s current state of criticism and publishing constraints out of the translator’s control. The inevitability of this situation for any printed translation outlines the entropy feature of drama translation—its natural tendency to move into a new order. As a reader or a spectator, one’s senses and expectations are inevitably affected by the amount of information already received about the play, usually through translations as these are often the most available form of material access to it. In the next section of this article, taking these two features as points to consider regarding drama translation, I examine the material problems faced as the translator of a collaborative play that never reached print in its own period and how this shapes the perception of Shakespeare, theatre, the history of the text and the play’s story.

Translating Sir Thomas More

13This play has idiosyncratic characteristics, such as the presence of several dramatists, traces of censorship, of revision, of replaced passages and of damaged parts, all of which make it a challenging work for both editors and translators. The nature of the manuscript gives the translator an unstable object with which to work. The translation works in a gatekeeping sense not only in relation to words and meaning, but also mediating between the play’s action and words—through variations and conjectural readings—and the stage, actors’ bodies, theatregoers and readers. The translated text originated as a process to discuss the performative condition of the literary object, arguing the interdisciplinary status of the theatrical artefact, something that might seem obvious, but that always needs to be recalled when drama is regarded as literature and collaborative undertakings could easily be disregarded as works of lesser quality.

• 20 . Underlined phrases and words here show what the copyist chooses to remove.
• 21 . “Tell me but this” is an addition by the copyist.
• 22 . Marked for removal by the copyist.

More
Nay, certainly you are.
For to the king God hath his office lent
Of dread, of justice, power and command;
Hath bid him rule, and willed you to obey.
And, to add ampler majesty to this,
He hath not only lent the king His figure,
His throne and sword, but given him His own name:
Calls him a god on earth. What do you, then,
Rising ’gainst him that God Himself installs,
But rise ’gainst God? What do you to your souls
In doing this? Oh, desperate as you are,
Wash your foul minds with tears, and those same hands
That you, like rebels, lift against the peace,
Lift up for peace; and your unreverent knees,
Make them your feet. To kneel to be forgiven
Is safer wars than ever you can make
Whose discipline is riot,
In, in, to your obedience! Why, even your hurly
Cannot proceed but by obedience.20
Tell me but this:21 what rebel captain,
As mutinies are incident, by his name
Can still the rout? Who will obey a traitor?
Or how can well that proclamation sound
When there is no addition but ‘a rebel’
To qualify a rebel? You’ll put down strangers,
Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses
And lead the majesty of law in lyam
To slip him like a hound. Alas, alas!22
Say now the King,
As he is clement, if th’offender mourn,
Should so much come too short of your great trespass
As but to banish you: whither would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbour? Go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, Spain or Portugal,
Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England:
Why, you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the elements
Were not all appropriate to your comforts
But chartered unto them? What would you think
To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case,
And this your mountanish inhumanity.
(Munday, Shakespeare et al., Sir Thomas More, Add. II (D), scene vi, lines 111-56)

15An important point on which to reflect is the transfer from page to stage. As spectators can we still perceive the multi-authorial condition of this or any collaborative play? Is it possible through translation? In some experiences of reading certain passages of Sir Thomas More, including this one above, it is noteworthy that many members of audiences make connections to several different Shakespearean plays that they have read. The fact that the passages attributed to Shakespeare are very distinct from the rest of the play, as the next quotes from it will show, may contribute to generating a different perception on the part of the audience. When the play was staged by the RSC ten years ago, it is said that the audience became more engaged in the play during this sequence. Whether they had their senses “prepared” it is impossible to know, but we may be relatively sure that publicity played its role in this. The Shakespearean sequence quoted above evokes many images and it deals with a relevant subject, the dangers of xenophobia. The gradual change of topic from rebellion against foreigners to sympathy for them, employing a set of easy-to-follow arguments, could be the reason for such engagement with the passage.

16However, it is not only the argument but also the procedure of the argument in the sequence of lines that awakens the senses of the spectator. As the passage ends and the revolt comes to a halt, the leaders surrender themselves to the authorities and the text returns to the hand of Anthony Munday and his own style; here, the high point of verbal intensity gives way to more placid dialogues. In Munday’s hand, the same scene follows on with the surrender of the rebels and the authorities thanking Thomas More for his role as a peace-maker. There is no use of metaphorical language or engagement with the audience’s imagination, even when Munday is crafting the same character as Shakespeare just a few lines later.

More
My lord, and breathren, what I here have spoke
My country’s love and, next, the City’s care
Enjoined me to; which since it thus prevails,
Think God hath made weak More His instrument (10)
To thwart sedition’s violent intent. (10)
(ibid.: lines 204-8)

17If the brutal changes in style in these scenes point to a different perception concerning authorial hands, a translator must aim to preserve much of the style of each hand to point to the transitions between one hand and another. However, this is not as easy as it may sound as in any play we have different characters who speak differently from each other and the tone of the scenes poses different choices in terms of the words and emotions for the characters, not to mention the development of the action, which usually affects all the characters.

Doll [Original Text]
Farewell, John Lincoln. Say all what they can,
Thou lived’st a good fellow, and died’st an honest man.
Clown Betts [Line by Thomas Heywood]
Would I were so far on my journey! The first stretch is the worst, methinks.
(Ibid.: Add. III, scene vii, lines 70-3)

19Another complex category is lacunae. Some parts of the manuscript, especially the edges, have suffered damage or are illegible. This leaves the play with small gaps, ranging from one or two words to a complete line. Editors have tried their best to recover what the text might have been, offering what they call “conjectural readings”. These vary considerably from one editor to another. Facing this issue, the translator has the option to choose one variant and continue, or to leave the space empty. Both solutions have their own problems because they give the text a stable status that does not represent the source. To overcome this, alternative readings are given in footnotes. In some cases, the absence of a variant may even be meaningful for the text for dramatic reasons. In the example below (191), there is a space, represented by “<>”, between the vocative and the question, when a daughter of Thomas More may be supposed to be crying when her father is being arrested:

More
To a great prison, to discharge the strife
Commenced ’twixt conscience and my frailer life,
More now must march. Chelsea, adieu, adieu.
Strange farewell: thou shalt ne’er more see More true,
For I shall ne’er see thee more. – Servants, farewell.
– Wife, mar not thine indifferent face. Be wise.
More’s widow’s husband, he must make thee rise.
– Daughters, <> what’s here, what’s here?
Mine eye had almost parted with a tear.
– Dear son, possess my virtue; that I ne’er gave.
Grave More thus lightly walks to a quick grave.
(Ibid.: Original Text, scene xiii, lines 184-94)

20In my translation of Sir Thomas More, I treated cases of lacunae individually, as choosing a particular stance—always using solutions provided by a pre-defined editor or using none—was not a good option because conjectural readings were chosen according to how well they sounded in Portuguese, especially if they were based on a proverb or they required rhyming with the previous or following line. All such lacunae were marked with a graphical sign to indicate their role in the playtext and a footnote pointing to their editorial origin.

21The sense, presence and absence of words, hands and dramatists were matters to bear in mind during the process of translating Sir Thomas More. The difficulty in approach arose from the desire to create a translation suitable for the stage, whereas most of the solutions found in the process affect only the reader. The limits of translating for the stage are only tested when the translated text is enacted under performance conditions; even using actors to test the lines is not a solution as every time a play is set, it is influenced by several conditions of theatrical practices and habits related to the physical space of the theatre and the place. As Susan Bassnett stated some years ago, the responsibility of the drama translator is limited (1998: 106), as translators are not the director or the dramaturgist. However, translation for the theatre may provide unlimited possibilities, based on the tendency of drama translation to become naturally dated (as part of a linguistic system circumscribed in a specific period) and facing the inherent tendency to the reordering of its own system (entropy) which affects these translations. Entropy here has a great range of possibilities: first, the text, as the leaves of a manuscript, can potentially be overlooked in a translation in which the original material condition is ignored and in which the marks of revision or censorship are not visible, the changes in hands are not indicated and conjectural readings are taken for granted. As the translator, I was also the gatekeeper of such information for those who might have contact with the translated play. Clearly, working with this kind of material I had to make many choices and take the most from the current state of criticism of the play regarding its features, trying not to occult its idiosyncrasies and appealing properties. However, like every “scholarly edifice against the erosion of subsequent enquiry” (Sharpe, 2014: 43), it will not escape from entropy, but will hopefully provide a chance for readers and spectators to review their ideas of authorship, possibly sharpening their senses.

22The translated text works as a starting point for considering authorial hands as it can provide a guideline for fitting the translated play to specific theatrical circumstances. A simple example is the presence of the Clown mentioned above. If a director wants to eliminate a character, he or she can easily choose not to follow this later addition to the play and this kind of insight opens up a new way of perceiving the play. Directors and actors can try the variations that the play offers and have recourse to its prismatic nature to their own advantage in fitting the play to their needs. Other approaches might rely on the textual transmission of the text, trying to make the most of lacunae or exploring the possibilities afforded by the lack of stage directions in some moments of the text. Therefore, some instances in which there are no definitive solutions in the text are open to different perceptions when the translated playtext makes its way to bodies, sound and movement.

23Most of the work involving several hands will go unnoticed as the play progresses, even if different styles are strictly preserved. This may point to the fact that whilst maintaining different styles and registers, the play has not lost its dramatic unity, a risk that is embedded in this kind of approach to the playtext. On the other hand, regarding the printed outcome of the translation of a play, authorial presence and collaboration make themselves visible in the text.