The Irony Shed

Open up a modern edition of Shakespeare’s Pericles to the chorus at the start of act 3, and you’ll find the narrator Gower alone on stage, standing (as he puts it in Act 4) ‘i’th’ gaps’ of the action, holding forth about how news of events in Tyre reached the court of Pentapolis by letter, and quickly spread:

… The sum of this

Brought hither to Pentapolis

Y-ravishèd the regions round,

And everyone with claps can sound

‘Our heir-apparent is a king!’

The enigmatic suitor Pericles who has just won over the King’s daughter is in fact a king – ‘Who dreamt,’ the not very good rhyming couplet continues, ‘who thought of such a thing?’. The word ‘Y-ravishèd’ is a bit odd. Although Pericles was written about 1608 (we don’t know exactly), the narrator Gower exists in a version of the late fourteenth century, speaking forth a kind of Middle English that is just strange enough to suggest a sense of past-ness. He says things like ‘eche’ (for ‘eke’, or ‘add to’) and ‘eyne’ (for eyes).

The problem is that that confident ‘Y-ravishèd’ was never printed in the 17^th century: it is what later editors thought Shakespeare (or his rather unpleasant co-author George Wilkins) probably meant. The printed editions from the 17^th-century had something different.

The first printing of the play in 1609 (the ‘first quarto’), gave readers this, at the line we read today as ‘Y-ravishèd the regions round’:

‘Iranyshed’? The second quarto (also in 1609) added a space to produce this:

Now we have ‘Irany shed.’ Pericles was a theatrical hit; new editions came out quickly. Just two years later, a third quarto changed things to this:

‘Irony shed’! And that construction was repeated in quartos 5 (1630) and 6 (1635), and in the Third Folio (1664), although in 1664 there was a shift from roman to italics:

We don’t have the manuscript that preceded the printed text, and we can’t – despite what some misty-eyed Shakespeareans might claim – have access to the author’s (or the authors’) intentions. But I think probably the most likely print-shop scenario is this. The compositor who was setting the type for the first quarto was intending to set the word ‘y-ravished’. The ‘y’ is a way for Gower’s speech to seem archaic – the word means ‘enraptured,’ and the line something like ‘the news spread over and seized the land.’ But the compositor got his fingers in a muddle and inserted a ‘u’ (which could stand for a ‘v’) upside down, to make an ‘n’: so, when the metal letters were locked and then inked and the paper was pressed, what was printed was not ‘Irauyshed’, but ‘Iranyshed.’ The whole edition is full of slips, so frankly one more isn’t going to sink the ship. By 1611, someone clearly thought that couldn’t be right and tried to guess at what it might mean; they came up with ‘Irony shed’, which stuck for the rest of the century. I love ‘Irony shed’, but it doesn’t make sense. In the ringing words of the barrister and Shakespearean editor Edmond Malone (1741-1812), ‘From the false print of the first edition, Iranyshed, the subsequent editors formed a still more absurd reading.’ It wasn’t until George Steevens (1736-1800) that the emendation ‘Y-ravishèd’ was proposed – which is what just about all subsequent editors have gone with. I think Steevens is probably right, but it is indubitably true that no one in the 17^th century who read Pericles would have read ‘Y-ravishèd’ – and so (this logic extended across the large number of corrections modern editions introduce) no one in the 17^th century read exactly the play we read today when we read Pericles.