P h i l o l o g i c a l Q u a r t e r ly | V o l u m e 9 1 | n o . 2 | S p r i n g
Volume 91 | no. 2 | Spring 2012
P h i l o l o g i c a l Q u a r t e r ly
Contents
2012
Introduction: Shakespeare for Sale.......................................... Adam G. Hooks The Market for Playbooks and the Development of the Reading Public................................................ Peter Berek Serials, Spinoffs, and Histories: Selling “Shakespeare” in Collection before the Folio.................. Tara L. Lyons Shakespeare’s Theatrical Folio............................................... Francis X. Connor The Shakespeare Apocrypha and Canonical Expansion in the Marketplace....................................................... Peter Kirwan Arms and the Book: “Workes,” “Playes,” and “Warlike Accoutrements” in William Cavendish’s The Country Captain......................................................... Vimala C. Pasupathi
ISSN 0031-7977
Playbills, Prologues, and Playbooks: Selling Shakespeare Adaptations, 1678–82.................Emma Lesley Depledge
P H I L O L O G I C A L Q U A R TE R L Y Volume 91
Spring 2012
Number 2
Philological Quarterly is published by the Department of English and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at The University of Iowa, in Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall. Subscription rate for institutions and libraries: one year, $70. Subscribers outside of the U.S. please add $10 for postage. Single back issues are $10, and double issues $20. The mailing address for subscriptions, renewals, and reporting address changes is Philological Quarterly, P.O. Box 0567, Selmer, TN 38375-0567. To contact customer service at our distributor, NCS Fulfillment, call 888-400-4961, or e-mail
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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Alvin Snider Editor Matthew Bevis Lori Branch Matthew P. Brown Margaret J. M. Ezell Robert D. Fulk Eric Gidal
Board of Editors
Kathy Lavezzo Maura Nolan Judith M. Pascoe Claire Sponsler Cynthia Wall Jonathan Wilcox
Special Issue Shakespeare For Sale Edited by Adam G. Hooks
Contents Introduction: Shakespeare for Sale
Adam G. Hooks 139
The Market for Playbooks and the Development of the Reading Public Peter Berek 151 Serials, Spinoffs, and Histories: Selling “Shakespeare” in Collection before the Folio
Tara L. Lyons 185
Shakespeare’s Theatrical Folio
Francis X. Connor 221
The Shakespeare Apocrypha and Canonical Expansion in the Marketplace
Peter Kirwan 247
Arms and the Book: “Workes,” “Playes,” and “Warlike Accoutrements” in William Cavendish’s The Country Captain
Vimala C. Pasupathi 277
Playbills, Prologues and Playbooks: Selling Shakespeare Adaptations, 1678–82
Emma Lesley Depledge 305
Book Reviews
Angelica Duran Alexander Pettit
331
Introduction: Shakespeare for Sale Adam G. Hooks
B
efore Romeo describes the “beggarly account of empty boxes” in the poor apothecary’s “needy shop,” he pauses to remember an “alligator stuffed, and other skins / Of ill-shaped fishes” among the “musty seeds” and “remnants of packthread” (5.1.42–47).1 The stuffed alligator—a common sight in an apothecary shop in Shakespeare’s day—seems to have done its job, for it caught Romeo’s attention, drawing him into the shop.2 Once inside, Romeo quickly gets to the business of insulting and then exploiting the apothecary’s poverty, demanding the dram of poison “whose sale is present death” (51). He ends the illicit transaction with a condemnation of currency itself: “There is thy gold—worse poison to men’s souls, / Doing more murder in this loathsome world, / Than these poor compounds that thou mayst not sell” (80–82). The shop is a site of suspicion and struggle, of dubious ethics, in which earthly needs force sinful behavior. As the apothecary protests, “My poverty but not my will consents” (75). Like the poison that Romeo relabels a “cordial” (85), currency is a mortal drug, a necessary evil required to survive—“buy food, and get thyself in flesh” (84), Romeo derisively commands—but which risks one’s immortal soul. The culture of consumption, as it is represented in Shakespeare’s plays, is a culture of corruption, and the very language of commerce—of buying and selling—distorts and debases those who employ it. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the Princess rebukes the “painted flourish” of Boyet’s praise, replying that “Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye, / Not uttered by base sale of chapmen’s tongues” (2.1.14–16). The Princess puns here on the dual meaning of “utter”—to speak, and to sell—to stress the inherent deception associated with “base sale.” Boyet’s “painted flourish” is later reprised in Biron’s exclamation “Fie, painted rhetoric! O, she needs it not. / To things of sale a seller’s praise belongs” (4.3.235–36). A “seller’s praise” is both insubstantial (merely “painted”) and untrustworthy: by disregarding intrinsic aesthetic quality, it inverts the hierarchy of values. Beauty is bought with judgement, not with flattery—or money. Such praise represents a perversion of beauty, 139
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making it nothing more than a thing of sale, and indeed Shakespeare alludes, here as elsewhere, to prostitution.3 His characters express a worldly wariness of commercial culture, but Shakespeare himself may have cast a less skeptical eye on the marketplace. He was, after all, a successful businessman, both as a sharer in his theatrical company and as an investor in real estate and dry goods in London and, especially, back home in Stratford-upon-Avon. (The sole surviving letter addressed to Shakespeare is a request for a loan, and he assiduously pursued legal action against those who failed to pay their debts to him.) Scholars have long been uncomfortable with this aspect of Shakespeare’s life; Edmund Malone tried to quell this uneasiness with a questionable yet influential biographical interpretation of sonnet 111, in which the speaker complains that fortune “did not better for my life provide / Than public means which public manners breeds” (3–4). Equating the poetic speaker with the author, Malone claimed that Shakespeare “seems here to lament his being reduced to the necessity of appearing on the stage, or writing for the theatre.”4 Malone’s version of Shakespeare is a poet wary of public life, focused only on the solitary pursuit of fulfilling his literary genius. He engages in the commercial world only to satisfy basic needs; artistically and spiritually, he remains isolated from the corruption of the vulgar world Romeo confronts and condemns in the apothecary’s shop. The next line of sonnet 111 reveals the consequences of public exposure, both material and spiritual: “Thence comes it that my name receives a brand.” “Brand” here means a stigma or a mark of infamy, and this is how commerce works in the plays—the apothecary bears the indelible mark of his poverty and his profession. Yet this use of “brand” also hints at the meaning the word would later acquire in the context of business, as a trademark. Whatever Shakespeare may (or may not) have thought, his name did receive a brand—indeed, it was a successful authorial brand in the bookshops of early modern London. He was known as an eloquent and erotic love poet (particularly for his early narrative poems Venus and Adonis and Lucrece); as the author of a series of best-selling English history plays; as the playwright responsible for sensational leading characters, like Richard III, Falstaff, and Hamlet; and even as the dramatist responsible for plays which, we know now, he wrote only in part, or not at all. In the terms used in the book trade, his poems and plays were vendible commodities—valuable to stationers because customers desired and bought them. To reverse the Princess’s formulation, then, Shakespeare’s worth was determined by his success in the market; in the book trade, his authorial reputation—his brand—was determined by economic, not aesthetic, factors.
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In the preliminaries to the volume of Shakespeare’s collected plays published in 1623 (what is now called the “First Folio”) the compilers John Heminge and Henry Condell say little about the literary quality or style of the plays, beyond the remark that Shakespeare was a “happie imitator of Nature,” and that the plays “haue had their trial alreadie”—that is, they have already proven successful on stage. And although their epistle is addressed to the “great Variety of Readers,” Heminge and Condell are less concerned with readers than with customers: as they write, “the fate of all Bookes”— and of the folio collection of plays, and thus of Shakespeare—“depends vpon your capacities: and not of your heads alone, but of your purses.” It is this anxiety over the potential success (or failure) of the book that leads to their insistent injunctions that “what euer you do, Buy.”5 Shakespeare’s quality is determined not by the critical judgments of readers, but of the willingness of customers to purchase the volume. That is, Shakespeare’s cultural and artistic value is determined by his commercial viability. The folio of 1623 presented Shakespeare as the sole author of a coherent artistic oeuvre, one that by the eighteenth century was firmly situated at the center of the English literary canon. It is this version of Shakespeare that Malone’s comment on sonnet 111 affirms, and editors have since gone to great lengths to separate Shakespeare from the dirty business of the commercial book trade. In the early twentieth century the New Bibliography minutely analyzed the work of early modern stationers in an effort to determine the genuine texts of Shakespeare’s plays.6 In doing so, however, they disparaged the work of compositors and printers, accusing them of mangling Shakespeare’s texts, ignorant as they were of literary value. At the other end of the twentieth century, the scholarship that has been labeled “the new textualism” brought a renewed attention to the material practices of the early modern printing house, revising earlier critical narratives by showing how the plays—and hence how Shakespearean authorship and authority—were the collaborative productions of the book trade. While decentering the author, this work still remained indebted to the trajectory embodied by the First Folio, tracing a gradual rise in the literary status attributed to Shakespeare and to printed drama.7 In the last decade, scholars have continued to refine this emphasis on the production and reception of early modern texts, turning attention away from authors and authorship and toward the interests and investments of the other agents involved. This work has variously focused on the fragmentation of the dramatic text (in the playhouse and the printing house, by booksellers and bookbinders, and by readers and collectors); the plays’ status as intellectual property; quantitative assessments of the reprint rates of playbooks, revealing their remark-
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able popularity; and the ways stationers read, interpreted, and even edited the texts they produced.8 All of this work looks beyond the conventional concerns of Shakespearean textual scholarship by starting to show the interpretive potential of bibliographical and historical work. Yet there has been a reaction against this radical disintegration of Shakespearean texts and Shakespearean authority. Several scholars have reasserted Shakespeare’s presence, reclaiming the author as an active participant in the construction of his cultural authority. In this view, Shakespeare designed his scripts not just for the theater, but for the printed page as well, thereby consciously crafting his persona in print.9 Rather than maintaining a strict separation between the artist and the book trade, as the New Bibliography did, this work rescues Shakespeare through different means, allowing him to engineer and authorize his own authorial presence. In a sense this is a biographical affirmation of the version of Shakespeare presented to us in the First Folio—the individuated literary genius—and as such could be considered anachronistic. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Shakespeare did not explicitly express a desire to be a laureate author, and in any case, such a desire would be immaterial. He could surely have been interested in the reputation fostered by his published work, but, unlike the stationers of the book trade (and their customers), he was not invested in his texts as commodities. The essays gathered here all focus on the marketplace of print, asking how, and why, and what it meant for Shakespeare to be put up for sale. Rather than lamenting the inversion of values evident in and exploited by the early modern book trade, these scholars attend to the business practices and the specific motivations of stationers, analyzing their impact on Shakespeare’s reputation. By combining individual case studies with larger trends, both commercial and critical, these essays revise and correct some of the central narratives of Shakespearean scholarship. As the ongoing debates over Shakespeare’s own attitude toward print demonstrate, the work of bibliography and book history is not merely a matter of objective fact; it is important to get the facts right, but the best work of this kind requires the evidence to be interpreted in an informed and perceptive manner. Each essay emphasizes interpretation—not just the interpretation of historical evidence, but the ways in which bibliographical and historical research directly impact the conventional concerns of literary criticism. Book history is by now well established in the mainstream of early modern studies—indeed, although more diffuse than earlier movements such as new historicism, it has attained a position as a critical orthodoxy. In an increasingly and irrevocably fragmented field, though, these essays show how the methodologies
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associated with book history and bibliography can influence a wide range of critical and interpretive interests. The contributors here all exhibit an astute awareness of the ways in which Shakespeare’s undeniable cultural authority can affect, alter, and even distort scholarly narratives. This authority is most powerfully embodied by the First Folio, the volume that every textual scholar must struggle with, or against. The essays in this issue all take their cue in some way from the Folio—and all of them look beyond its cultural and financial value in order to reveal the other material forms in which Shakespeare circulated, what those forms meant to contemporaries, and how they force us to redefine and reconsider some of the central issues in the field. This special issue, then, challenges some cherished assumptions about, and confronts the problems posed by, the Shakespeare represented by the folio. The principal issues at stake can be categorized under the following general rubrics: the connection or correlation between ethics and economics; the definition and evolution of “literary” status; the emergence of authorship as an organizing principle; reading and interpreting the evidence of both artifacts and literary texts; the politics of buying and selling; and the appropriation of Shakespeare for specific political agendas. In different ways, every essay considers, contests, or changes how we think about these crucial concepts. In his essay “The Market for Playbooks and the Development of the Reading Public,” Peter Berek explains how the commercial strategies of the book trade helped to create—and to create conflicts within—the early modern public sphere. By attending to title pages, playtexts, and paratexts, Berek shows how marketing tactics, and the tastes of customers which those tactics shaped, shifted over time. In a strategy familiar to twenty-firstcentury consumers, stationers aimed to create niche markets. While at first publishers advertised plays as either “theatrical” or “literary,” diverse strategies eventually developed for marketing playbooks to an emerging reading (and buying) public. Berek provides a useful set of criteria for describing a continuum of marketing tactics, emphasizing that these were decisions made by stationers, and not authors. Stationers marketed their books to aspirational readers, thereby enabling a form of self-identification through commercial affiliation. Berek extends this analysis by going beyond title pages, asking what it meant to go shopping in early modern London. He answers this question by taking us inside the enclosed spaces of early modern shops to see what customers encountered, demonstrating the desire, and the ambivalence, evoked by the experience. According to Berek, commerce posed an ethical problem for consumers: often described in eroticized language, commercial
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transactions provoked anxiety and conflict, even as they also created a kind of equality among buyers and sellers. The act of exchanging one thing for another granted a degree of control to individual actors, rather than subsuming them within impersonal market forces. Commercial transactions thus became sites of negotiation and contestation in which control over the meaning of playbooks was at stake. Stationers displayed a sophisticated awareness of theatrical genre and theatrical history, an awareness shared by an increasingly sophisticated and segmented reading public. Using examples such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida, Berek shows how competing forms of marketing shaped the meanings of early modern playbooks. While the stationers were firmly in control of Shakespeare’s printed corpus, some authors—most notably and insistently Ben Jonson— actively attempted to control, or at least negotiate among, stationers, customers, and readers. Ending with a lengthy reading of Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humor in relation to Jonson’s ambitions and to the emerging reading publics, Berek’s essay reveals the interpretive potential of work that combines bibliographical, socioeconomic, and literary approaches. Tara L. Lyons likewise attends to the marketing tactics of stationers, along with the material forms of playbooks as they were made available to, and were altered by, customers and collectors. In “Serials, Spinoffs, and Histories: Selling ‘Shakespeare’ in Collection before the Folio,” Lyons provides a genealogy of the dramatic collection by looking beyond the unifying principle of authorship. The First Folio, and the version of Shakespearean authorship it promulgates, has obscured the great variety of printed dramatic collections that preceded it, and the multiple agents responsible for their production. Lyons focuses on the various sequences of historical plays in smaller formats to show how stationers, capitalizing on the popularity of the genre (with its familiar narratives), produced an organizational framework for readers based on the interdependent principles of seriality and historicity. The long plot-driven descriptions on the title pages of early history plays show how the stationers first defined the genre—as plays embedded in a larger historical narrative—while building a market segment of dependable customers who would return for subsequent installments. By linking Shakespeare’s name to this established genre, publishers helped create his reputation as the playwright most closely identified with the popular form of the English history play. The emergence of Shakespeare as an author was thus a result of the process of collection—both by stationers and by readers who bound their purchases together—not, as the conventional critical narrative would have it, as a preexisting condition that would find its ultimate fulfillment in the Folio.
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The central case study of Lyons’s essay is one of the most puzzling bibliographical problems in Shakespearean scholarship: the collection known as the Pavier quartos, the series of Shakespearean plays published by Thomas Pavier in 1619, some of which bear false imprints and authorial attributions. Lyons challenges the prevailing approaches to this collection that treat it either as a threat or as a precursor to the folio of 1623, the publication of which is seen as the transformational event in Shakespeare’s authorial afterlife. Lyons makes a compelling case that Pavier’s collection was a product of his own long-standing strategy of serial publication. Shakespeare was appealing to Pavier because of his association with serial history plays, while the nonhistorical plays in the collection capitalized on the publisher’s penchant for producing spin-offs of plays in other genres, such as ballads, romances, and prose histories. Pavier thus appealed to the varying interests of his customers by making available multiple possible interpretive links among the ten plays in his collection. Authorship was one principle of organization, but it played only a supporting role. Rather than superseding Pavier’s efforts, the Folio actually integrated its fundamental principle of seriality, placing a coherent sequence of history plays—Shakespeare’s signature genre—at the material and conceptual center of the volume. Lyons shows that the First Folio was less a transformation of Shakespeare’s reputation than a replication of acknowledged and successful marketing strategies in the book trade. Francis X. Connor takes aim at the Folio itself, challenging its place in the standard critical narrative by focusing on its contemporary reception. In “Shakespeare’s Theatrical Folio,” Connor argues against the standard stage-to-page trajectory that sees the publication of the Folio as the moment when unworthy and ephemeral plays became properly literary works, and thus when Shakespeare finally made the transition from playwright to literary auteur. Instead, Connor contends that the compilers of the Folio emphasized the interdependence of the theater and the book. Connor uncouples Shakespeare’s folio from what is often seen as its precursor and companion, Ben Jonson’s folio Workes of 1616, which embodied Jonson’s own totalizing and canonizing ambitions. The prefatory matter in the Shakespeare folio, however, urges buyers to return to the theater and to continue seeing Shakespeare’s plays in performance. Like Berek, then, Connor sees both the playhouses and the bookstalls as marketplaces in which status and esteem depend on economic success. Connor’s essay builds on a comprehensive bibliographical project that analyzes folio publication in the early modern book trade—a project that shows that many of our received notions about the status of the folio format itself are misguided. His essay here emphasizes the critical potential of
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this kind of bibliographical work, demonstrating how one must interpret bibliographical data, and also how one can bring literary-critical methods to bear on what has often been seen as a merely bibliographical problem. In revealing readings of the folio’s prefatory matter, Connor explains how the competing dedicatory epistles written by Heminge and Condell—one to aristocratic patrons, and one to the “great Variety of Readers”—give power and cultural authority to book buyers and to theater audiences, whose purses would determine the success or failure of the project. The preliminaries express a kind of capitalist extension of an implicit argument that Shakespeare himself seems to make in the first play in the volume, The Tempest. In that insistently bookish play, a book’s value is determined by its usefulness in theatrical performance—it is the effect of a book’s use and display, rather than its materiality or content, that is of central concern. The Folio’s preliminaries express a similar sentiment, that the book itself is inadequate to preserve Shakespeare’s fame, which must continue to be renewed in the theater. The First Folio syndicate marketed the volume as the material and textual embodiment of Shakespeare—as his corpus, consecrated and canonized. Peter Kirwan argues, though, that the Folio was simply one among many attempts to standardize the Shakespeare canon. In “The Shakespeare Apocrypha and Canonical Expansion in the Marketplace,” Kirwan begins by asking a question: how much Shakespeare counts as Shakespeare? He goes on to argue for the market-based response that Shakespeare is defined by what can be sold as Shakespearean. Kirwan’s starting point is the Third Folio of 1663, which was reissued in 1664 with seven additional plays attributed to Shakespeare; although all had some material claim to be Shakespearean, only one, Pericles, has gained admittance to the canon. The Third Folio was the first publication to imply the superior value of comprehensiveness, emphasizing the value of quantity over authority. These seven plays form the core of the so-called Shakespeare “apocrypha”—the very name indicating Shakespeare’s sacred status. The contents of the apocrypha have shifted over time, due to various commercial imperatives and changing critical concerns and methods. As Kirwan shows by detailing the subsequent history of the apocryphal plays in the eighteenth century, these shifts had very little to do with modern standards of scholarship. By examining the contents and organizational strategies of editions of Shakespeare’s collected works, Kirwan demonstrates how publishers and customers could alter the Shakespeare canon. Kirwan’s evidence ranges from familiar subjects such as the Tonson publishing cartel, and Alexander Pope and Lewis Theobald (both of whose editions failed to fully reflect their editorial principles, in part due to com-
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mercial concerns), to overlooked publishers such as Robert Walker, whose cheap and popular editions of Shakespeare allowed readers to make some striking and unfamiliar juxtapositions and connections among the plays. The ghost of Shakespeare himself was even made to appear onstage, intervening in the debate in order to authorize—or to repudiate the instability of—the fluctuating canon. Kirwan also connects the history of the apocrypha to the current interest in the composition of the canon. While the marketplace demands homogeneity, in the form of authoritative editions of the complete works, there also exists a reader-generated impulse towards the novelty and plurality of canonical expansion. As the publication of the Arden edition of Double Falsehood demonstrates, there are now, as there have always been, those for whom more Shakespeare is better. “Shakespeare” continues to be defined by what can be sold as Shakespearean. The final two essays address the ways that Shakespeare was sold, read, and adapted in two crucial moments of political turmoil: the onset of the English Civil War, and the Exclusion Crisis. In “Arms and the Book: ‘Workes,’ ‘Playes,’ and ‘Warlike Accoutrements’ in William Cavendish’s The Country Captain,” Vimala Pasupathi shows what Shakespeare’s works meant—and what it meant to buy those works in book form—in the waning years of the reign of Charles I. Cavendish begins his play with the eponymous and newly commissioned country captain—aptly named Underwit—pondering how to acquire the “warlike accoutrements” befitting his new position by alluding to Shakespeare’s similar parody of military provisioning in 2 Henry IV. Remarkably, the “warlike accoutrements” that Underwit acquires are books—including a copy of a Shakespeare folio—all of which include some kind of militaristic pun (the folio is thought to be particularly apt for pikemen, the soldiers who would shake spears in battle). Pasupathi contextualizes and explicates this staged transaction, which gives us a rare glimpse of the lower reaches of the great variety of readers imagined by the Folio’s compilers. The Country Captain shows us a member of the aspirant classes asserting his place in the social world by performing a familiarity with books—in the process demonstrating the place of Shakespeare within an emerging vernacular dramatic canon. Pasupathi takes seriously the misunderstood titles of the books purchased for Underwit, revealing their complicated allusions to various contemporary political and religious controversies. She also explicates the title Cavendish’s characters give to the folio—“Shakespeares workes”—revealing a tension in the play between martial labor and recreational pleasure. As Underwit objects, Shakespeare’s “workes” are merely “Playes.” The play on words was both familiar and irresistible, especially after the publication of Jonson’s folio in 1616, when he
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was mocked for giving his plays the lofty title of Workes. By placing this literary distinction in a military context, Pasupathi emphasizes both the complicated process of canon formation in the Caroline period, and the complicated political valence of Shakespeare. Pasupathi shows how Shakespeare could be characterized as a model whose work could be used to engage with contemporary political disputes. Emma Lesley Depledge similarly shows how Shakespeare was revived as a participant in a moment of political upheaval later in the seventeenth century. Depledge details how Shakespeare’s plays were adapted and appropriated during the Exclusion Crisis, a crucial point in the history of England and, as she argues, for Shakespeare’s reputation, as well. In “Playbills, Prologues, and Playbooks: Selling Shakespeare Adaptations, 1678–82,” Depledge considers the various ways Shakespeare’s texts were altered (the term in use at the time) and the varying and conflicting ways those alterations were marketed across media. In both the theater and the publishing industries, Shakespeare proved to be politically and financially expedient, and his plays experienced a renewed visibility on stage and in print during the years of the Crisis. Producing Shakespeare alterations allowed playwrights to satisfy the demand for new plays in a difficult political and commercial environment. They were able to evade censorship by appealing to Shakespeare’s reputation (and to the convenient fact that he had been dead for over half a century). This is not to say that Shakespeare was a neutral political presence, though. His work did retain a degree of protection, even while proving politically relevant; the plays most often altered, after all, were the histories and tragedies, not the comedies. Analyzing the paratexts of these plays, Depledge shows how playwrights, performers, and publishers negotiated this precarious political environment. Playbills stressed the novelty of the alterations, while the theatrical prologues modified and mollified audience expectations (and perhaps those of the censors) by attributing the plays to Shakespeare, stressing their historical isolation from current events. Dryden even resurrected Shakespeare’s ghost on stage to claim and to authorize his own alteration of Troilus and Cressida. In print, however, these exaggerated claims for Shakespeare’s authorship were reversed once more, as the title pages and prefatory materials of playbooks advertised the alterations as new works by contemporary playwrights—perhaps a result of the expiration of the Licensing Act governing the book trade, which was not renewed due to the Crisis. Depledge shows that Shakespeare’s popularity at this time was thus not a function of his preexisting fame; rather, that fame resulted once again from a constellation of interests, agents, and affiliations. Together, the essays in this issue show how “Shakespeare,” his works, and
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the accretion of critical narratives about them have always been radically and fundamentally collaborative. The connections among the essays result in part from the current critical environment, demonstrating the advantages of building on previous historical work while exploiting the full range of interpretive methodologies. These connections are also the result of a fundamentally (and enjoyably) collaborative effort, for this special issue began as a seminar I convened at the Shakespeare Association of America conference in 2011 (also called “Shakespeare for Sale”). As the essays evolved, we maintained and benefited from the generously and rigorously productive environment of the seminar. I would like to thank all of the contributors for their work, not only in revising and expanding their own essays, but for challenging the work of their peers. I would also like to thank members of the seminar whose work is not included here, but who nevertheless made significant contributions, particularly Alan B. Farmer, Douglas Bruster, and Sarah Neville. Finally, I would like to thank Alvin Snider, who perceptively and patiently guided this issue to press, as he has so expertly guided Philological Quarterly as its editor over the past few years.
University of Iowa
NOTES 1
Quotations from Shakespeare are taken from The Norton Shakespeare, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2008).
2
The association between alligators and apothecaries is explained in the commentary on this passage from Romeo and Juliet in A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, ed. Horace Howard Furness (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1871), 262–63.
3
While instructing Reynaldo on how to spy on Laertes in France, Polonius provides a precise definition of the phrase: “‘I saw him enter such a house of sale,’ / Videlicet, a brothel” (2.1.60–61). Lysimachus likewise uses the phrase upon meeting Marina just outside the brothel in Mytilene, in Pericles: “Why, the house you dwell in / Proclaimeth you a creature of sale” (19.72–73).
4
Edmund Malone, Supplement to the Edition of Shakspeare’s Plays Published in 1778 by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, 2 vols. (London, 1780), 1:670.
5 “To the great Variety of Readers,” quoted from Charlton Hinman, The First Folio of Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1996). 6
For a recent overview of the New Bibliography, and particularly its influence on editorial principles, see Gabriel Egan, The Struggle for Shakespeare’s Text: Twentieth-Century Editorial Theory and Practice (Cambridge U. Press, 2010).
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Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass are credited with coining the term “New Textualism” in their landmark essay “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993): 255–83. Representative work includes A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (Columbia U. Press, 1997); Kastan’s own Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge U. Press, 2001); Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge U. Press, 1997); and Douglas Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge U. Press, 2000).
8
Representative recent work includes Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge U. Press, 2009); Jeffrey Todd Knight, Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); James J. Marino, Owning William Shakespeare: The King’s Men and Their Intellectual Property (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, “The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited,” Shakespeare Quarterly 56 (2005): 1–32; Lesser’s own Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge U. Press, 2004); Sonia Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge U. Press, 2007); and Marta Straznicky, ed., Shakespeare’s Stationers: Studies in Cultural Bibliography (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
9
This strand of scholarship is most identified with Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge U. Press, 2003); Patrick Cheney’s Shakespeare, National PoetPlaywright (Cambridge U. Press, 2004) and Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship (Cambridge U. Press, 2008); and Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare Only (U. of Chicago Press, 2009).
The Market for Playbooks and the Development of the Reading Public Peter Berek
E
lizabethan stationers who printed and sold plays were creating a reading public, and the physical properties of early playbooks can tell us a good deal about how that public came into being. The appearance of title pages and of paratextual materials developed from conscious, and changing, decisions by stationers about how a play should look in print if it was going to sell in the marketplace. As the numbers of printed plays increased, the appearance of playbooks changed. And the changes happened fast. Only as the number of plays in print increased could a reading public for plays begin to develop. That public developed in controversy made visible in the bookshop. Printing plays of the professional theater doesn’t begin on a substantial scale until 1590. Only ten plays appear in first editions from the beginning of printing through 1589, fifty-three in the next decade, ninety-five between 1600 and 1609.1 Richard Jones, printing Marlowe’s Tamburlaine in 1590, tells his “gentlemen readers” that he is omitting “some fond and frivolous gestures” that will be “tedious to the wise,” though “they have been of some vain conceited fondlings greatly gaped at” when the play was performed.2 In an epistle conspicuous to a browser, Jones tries to sell Tamburlaine by telling its readers that they are superior to theatergoers. Similarly, John Fletcher’s dedicatory epistle to The Faithful Shepherdess (published without a date by Bonian and Walley, probably in 1609) offers a rather testy explanation of what he means by “pastoral.” Fletcher begins, “If you be not reasonably assurde of your knowledge in this kinde of Poeme, lay downe the booke or read this, which I could wish had bene the prologue.” Only the sophisticated need pursue the reading of this play. The theatrical audience, Fletcher says, was too dimwitted to realize that his shepherds were “the owners of flockes, and not hyrelings.”3 Thus, the audience expected “whitsun ales . . . and morris-dances,” and condemned The Faithful Shepherdess for their absence. Fletcher patronizes the theatrical audience for a failure of knowledge that 151
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amounts to a failure of manners. They are simply not our kind of people, and catching up with our worldliness is their own problem. The prefatory poems in the quarto printing similarly express distaste for the theatrical audience. Stationer Walter Burre’s epistle preceding Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1613) promotes the play precisely because it failed in the theater. Burre pursues the same strategy Fletcher did in The Faithful Shepherdess: by admiring—and purchasing—this play, the book buyer defines him or herself as superior in taste to those who disliked the play in the theater. A conflict in taste among members of the audience is of course the subject and running joke of Beaumont’s play. If Burre’s epistle is to be believed, foregrounding in the theater the divisions of taste among the theater audience did not succeed in drawing an audience when Pestle was first performed, but by 1613 it seems a winning marketing plan for a playbook. These examples, drawn from the beginning and end of the years on which I focus, show a pattern familiar to us of marketing goods by implying that their ownership is a sign of status. Segmenting their market, printers and booksellers directed particular plays at particular niches. Doing so, they anticipated a strategy familiar in our own time to anyone who shops for cars or whiskey or magazine subscriptions. Marketers sell goods by appealing to a customer’s desire for affiliation with one set of peers and distinction from others. Though owners of Buicks and Audis may have the same income, they don’t want to be perceived as like one another, and this desire to assert difference helps sell both brands of cars. At the same time, the segmentation of the market implies that taste is a matter for debate and that all members of an audience do not have an equal ability, or an equal right, to perceive or control the meaning of a text. (That is surely the point being made by Fletcher and Burre.) Segmenting the market is both a strategy for selling books and (as I will show later) a step in a continuing debate about who has the ability to control meaning. Zachary Lesser persuasively shows how Walter Burre uses the language and typography of title pages to suggest that the plays he issues are aimed at what Lesser calls a “select” audience.4 (Indeed, Lesser believes that individual stationers occupied ideological niches and marketed multiple titles to similar readers.) But Burre is not inventing a strategy; the plays he issues participate in the larger evolution of the audience for books of plays. The market segment to which Burre appeals already exists when he begins to print Jonson. Moreover, plays that appeal to a “select” audience are only half the story. Other playbooks have title pages or paratextual features suggesting they are aimed at a different market. I’m not suggesting “rival traditions” as Alfred Harbage did a half century ago. Focusing on performance,
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Harbage ranged men against boys; open-air amphitheaters against indoor stages; a mass audience ready to pay a penny against a coterie audience that could afford a shilling; an audience with little schooling against the wits of the Inns of Court; the sturdy faith and morals of the English countryside against the irregular eroticism and skepticism of fashionable city dwellers.5 The sharp divisions among playgoers Harbage imagined probably never existed, and in any case the market for printed plays is less tidy. Boys and men, amphitheater and hall are compatible with multiple marketing strategies.6 The classic arguments for “rival traditions” focus on the high price of admission to the indoor theaters. While the affluent can choose to attend either the Globe or Blackfriars, the less well-off can afford only the Globe. If audiences are differentiated, the core of the difference is economic. But the potential audience for books is quite different from the potential audience for theatrical performances. All segments of the book audience are literate, and all pay the same price for a quarto copy of a play—probably between sixpence and a shilling.7 In Cheap Print and Popular Piety, Tessa Watt speaks of single-sheet ballads and broadsides, which sold for a penny, or twentyfour-page octavos that also used a single sheet of paper, as the kinds of text that might achieve “popular” distribution, perhaps even in a rural peddler’s pack.8 Single-volume editions of professional plays are more expensive. Yet one could purchase a playbook for the price of admission to an indoor theater, or several visits to an amphitheater while seated in the galleries. By the sensible standards Tessa Watt uses, purchasers of playbooks are more affluent than the broader audience for ballads or single-sheet pamphlets. Whatever their desired audience, playbooks that want to appeal to one kind of reader benefit from constructing other kinds of potential readers as outsiders. Insiders and outsiders need one another. In our own world, theatergoers who want to feel sophisticated because they attend straight plays need the audience for popular musicals to make their own tastes seem notable, and vice versa. Broadway and Off Broadway, West End and Fringe need one another. Taste, as many recent critics have argued, is aspirational, conferring as much as reflecting status.9 Aspiration is part of the history of printed books from the beginning of printing. Books could be both practical objects and desired luxuries. Though printing eventually made possible a mass market in books, early printed books were luxury objects. Lisa Jardine traces the development of the book trade, chiefly on the continent, in Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance.10 Early printed books mimicked the look of manuscripts in their typefaces and left room on their pages for illuminations done by hand. Such volumes found homes in aristocratic libraries, usually in expensive bindings. As books circulated more widely and in less expensive editions, printers still catered to a luxury trade
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by printing some copies of an edition on vellum, or on higher quality paper or larger sheets. Book buyers could themselves raise the status of a volume by their choice of binding. In fact, some booksellers were also binders and may themselves have modified their merchandize to appeal to customers with varied objects of desire.11 Whether a book was bound in a luxury fabric such as velvet, or in the skin of goat, sheep, or calf, greatly affected its value and status.12 Though printing in cheap format, stationers such as Jones or Bonian and Walley tried by paratextual materials to imply that purchasing Tamburlaine or The Faithful Shepherdess was an embrace of luxury taste.
Shopping for Playbooks Some marketing strategies may have arisen from anxieties about the status of shopping itself. Shopping—even shopping for books—is fraught with anxieties and contradictions similar to those associated with stage performances. Like theaters, shops—even bookshops—were sites where conflicting ideologies clashed. Ben Jonson renders some of these conflicts in his portrayal of Lantern Leatherhead’s shop in Bartholomew Fair. Standing in his shop, Leatherhead asks passersby if they lack “rattles, drums, halberds, horses, babies o’ the best? Fiddles o’th’finest?”13 The shop and the fair are sites of desire, but desire of doubtful legitimacy. Wasp fears his feebleminded ward, Cokes, will waste his treasure in the fair on trinkets of the kind Leatherhead sells. Proctor John Littlewit and his wife, Win-the-Fight, want to visit the fair to see the “motion” Littlewit has written for Leatherhead’s puppets. But to satisfy their desire for Art and evade Puritan strictures they must feign the promptings of Nature: pregnant Win claims to long to eat of the pig on sale at the fair, and Rabbi Zeal-of-the-Land Busy sanctions such “carnal disease, or appetite, incident to women” as “natural, very natural.” Though eating a Bartholomew-pig could be a form of “idolatry,” all can satisfy their desires so long as the pig “be eaten with a reformed mouth” (1.6.50–76). Desires expressed, desires thwarted, desires allowed are as powerful as the discourse of desire is hypocritical. Desire is corporal, carnal, fleshly: at the center of the fair, both physically and ethically, is Ursula the pig-woman: purveyor of roast pig, ale, and whores; huge in flesh, dripping in sweat, the embodiment of what women and men simultaneously scorn and need. Ursula is as natural as the forces of the market. (Proper Win has recourse to Ursula’s booth to answer a call of nature.) Can this force of nature be controlled? Rabbi Busy’s religious control is all fakery in the interest of fulfilling his own longings. More admirable, though comically lacking in efficacy, are the efforts of Adam Overdo, going about the fair in disguise to preserve good government of both individual and society by ferreting out
PLAYBOOKS AND THE READING PUBLIC
“enormities” as grossly apparent as Ursula. Bartholomew Fair presumes an audience that is ambivalent about commerce; only such an audience will find Overdo both endearing and funny. Ambivalence about commerce shows up even in the language of tracts promoting international trade. Writing on behalf of the company of Merchant Adventurers in 1601, John Wheeler criticizes trading in Europe by Englishmen who are not of his company, saying they “show an exorbitant, and unsatiable desire, and greedines of gaine.” Wheeler is arguing for regulated, monopolistic trade rather than “a dispersed, stragling, and promiscuous trade.”14 Wheeler’s eroticized language sounds more than a little like hypocritical Busy or sincere Overdo. Wheeler argues that buying and selling is the natural condition of human beings. But his exuberant catalogue of the universal drive to the market sounds like the unconscious self-parody of a Jonson character: The Prince with his subjects, the Maister with his servants, one friend and acquaintance with another, the Captaine with his souldiers, the Husband with his wife, Women with and among themselves, and in a word, all the world choppeth and changeth, runneth & raveth after Marts, Markets and Merchandising, so that all things come into Commerce, and passe into traffique (in a maner) in all times, and in all places: not onely that, which nature bringeth forth, as the fruits of the earth, the beasts, and living creatures, with their spoiles, skinnes, and cases, the metals, minerals, and such like things, but further also, this man maketh merchandise of the workes of his own handes, this man of another mans labour, one selleth words, another maketh tafficke [traffic?] of the skins & bloud of other men, yea, there are some found so subtile and cunning merchants, that they perswade and induce men to suffer themselves to bee bought and sold, and we have seene in our time enow, and too many which have made merchandise of mens soules.15
By and large, writers about what we would call economics were critical of consumption and of shopping. Many of the kinds of goods one could acquire by purchase were imported, and buying goods from overseas was seen as diminishing the wealth of England. Yet despite falling real wages and rising prices, the demand for goods and consumption of goods increased in the years around 1600.16 David J. Baker quotes Edward Misselden, writing in 1623: “Poverty, alas, and Prodigality” are “the two extremities of the Kingdome at this day.” Shopping is a form of prodigality and makes one “‘a prey to the Diuell.’” William Harrison in his 1587 Description of England says “for desire of novelty we oft exchange our finest cloth, corn, tin and wools for halfpenny cockhorses for children, dogs of wax or of cheese, twopenny tabors, leaden swords, painted feathers, gewgaws for fools, dogtricks for dizzards, hawkshoods, and suchlike trumpery, whereby we reap just mockage and reproach in other countries.”17 The wares purchased sound like those on sale by Leatherhead. Shopping was a form of folly. And the book trade was at least potentially an example of such folly: learned books, especially those
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in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, were usually imported from abroad, and even English books from English presses were printed on paper made overseas.18 Commerce and shopping created anxiety in part because the forms they took were novel. In rural medieval England, households were largely selfsufficient. Much economic exchange took place through barter. What we would call shopping happened in markets—open-air, public places where those with goods to sell could meet those who might wish to buy. Civic authorities regulated the location and scheduling of markets and also regulated the kinds of goods that could be sold and the prices of those goods, as well as trying to assure the quality of those goods. It was assumed that goods had a just price and that deviation from such prices could lead to illicit and quasi-usurious enrichment. In an open market, all could see the goods for sale and assess the legitimacy of transactions. Transactions out of the public marketplace were suspect: if sellers and buyers met in an inn, for example, they might be trying to evade civic regulation. Fixed shops had obvious conveniences: wares for sale could be readily at hand instead of having to be moved, set out, and then taken away at the end of the market day. Seller and buyer, as well as goods, were protected from the weather. Customers could shop at their convenience instead of having to wait for a market day. But the shop was also a place of suspicion. Enclosed, out of public view, trading might be taking place on the Sabbath. Illicit or stolen goods might be sold; goods might be sold at unjust prices. Shops were dark; how could buyers judge the quality of goods they could barely see? Just as trade seemed suspect because of a prevailing ideology that the importation of goods drew wealth from England, so enclosed shops seemed suspect because their enclosure might conceal illegitimate or unjust transactions. Nonetheless, trade grew, shops proliferated. In London around 1600, trading and shopping were occasions for national and civic pride as well as sites of ideological contradiction.19 While acknowledging that representations of conflict probably exceeded the reality of conflict, Ian W. Archer says, “the desire for goods was linked with sexual desire.”20 Luxury goods were equated with lust, and London shopkeepers were perceived as using their wives to attract the patronage of City gallants. Women’s pride in their attire seemed a threat to patriarchal orthodoxy. The behavior Archer describes is the stuff of many City comedies. Moll Frith—“Moll Cutpurse”— in The Roaring Girl uses the same phrase as John Wheeler when she says, “Marriage is but a chopping and a changing.”21 Like the theaters, which Gosson and others called “markets for bawdry,” shopping is a source of anxious pleasure.22 Theatrical performance and the bookshop are alike part of the world of commerce. In The Gulls Hornbook Thomas Dekker writes that
PLAYBOOKS AND THE READING PUBLIC
“The Theater is your poets’ Royal Exchange upon which their Muses (that are now turned to merchants) meeting, barter away that light commodity of words for a lighter ware then words—plaudites and the breath of the great beast; which (like the threatnings of two cowards) vanish all into air.”23 After taking his gallant to the theater, Dekker takes him shopping: I could now fetch you about noone (the houre which I prescribed you before to rise at) out of your chamber, and carry you with mee in to Paules Church-yard, where planting your selfe in a Stationers shop, many instructions are to bee giuen you, what bookes to call for, how to censure of new bookes, how to mew at the old, how to looke in your tables and inquire for such and such Greeke, French, Italian or Spanish Authors, whose names you haue there, but whom your mother for pitty would not giue you so much wit as to vnderstand. From thence you should blow your selfe into the Tobacco-Ordinary, where you are likewise to spend your iudgement (like a Quacksaluer) vpon that mysticall wonder, to bee able to discourse whether your Cane or your Pudding be sweetest, and which pipe has the best boare, and which turnes black, which breakes in the burning.24
Shopping for books is as much a part of the trade in fashion and luxury as shopping for tobacco. For Dekker’s gallant, displaying desire asserts status: that presumably is why he asks about titles in languages he cannot read.25 In what ways did London bookshops participate in the desire for luxury goods? First of all, simply by being shops. Peter Blayney’s research has established that stationers sold books on the ground floor of multistory buildings that often had residential spaces above, cellars beneath for storage, and often some division between front and rear portions of the ground floor. The shop front would have a “stall-board” projecting from the front wall and a “penthouse” or “pentice” above the stall-board, unless the story above the shop projected outward in a “jutty.” Stall-board and pentice could be folded up and down, respectively, to close the open window between them. A door gave entrance into the shop.26 While books may once have been sold from barrows, stalls, or booths, this was no longer the case by the end of the sixteenth century. In their layout and configurations, bookshops were like the shops that sold other kinds of goods—indeed, bookshops probably sold writing materials and other goods in addition to books. Moreover, shops that sold other kinds of merchandise were likely to be in the same neighborhood as bookshops. There were unquestionably neighborhoods in London where bookshops clustered, but even around St. Paul’s—the largest cluster of bookshops—there were other kinds of shops as well.27 There was no sharp divide between browsing for books and going shopping. At least some of the places where books were sold were associated with sophisticated taste and luxury. Temple Bar was a plausible place for selling playbooks as well as law books because it is adjacent to the Temple and a very short walk from the other Inns of Court. Young men of the Inns of
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Court were likely customers for playbooks. But other clusters of booksellers were near celebrated sites for upmarket shopping. Books seem to have been sold along with many luxury goods at the Royal Exchange, the New Exchange in the Strand, and Westminster Hall.28 Perhaps even more significant is the proximity of St. Paul’s and its precincts to Cheapside. The west end of Cheapside ran into Paul’s Cross Churchyard. Cheapside was the great shopping street of London, combining “high-class retail shopping and a busy produce market.” This west end of the street included “Goldsmith’s Row, described in 1603 as the most beautiful frame of fair houses and shops, in London or anywhere in England.” Thomas Platter, visiting London, wrote in 1599 that in Cheapside “great treasures and vast amounts of money may be seen.”29 The center of London’s book trade was a few footsteps away from one of its chief displays of objects of desire, as well as from its great cathedral.
Packaging the Product to Segment the Market Like today’s dust jackets or paperback covers, title pages served as the crucial form of “point-of-sale” advertising for books. Ben Jonson acknowledges as much when he says in the 1611 quarto of Catiline, addressing what he calls “the reader in ordinarie”: “The Muses forbid, that I should restrayne your medling, whom I see already busie with the Title, and tricking ouer the leaues” (A3r). If books or folded sheets were displayed on the stall-board of a shop or inside on tables or counters, title pages are what browsers would first see. Stationers also posted title pages to advertise their wares.30 A browser who opened a bound or stab-stitched volume would see any paratextual materials, such as epistles of the kind I have been quoting, dedications, or commendatory poems. Stationers used title pages and paratexts to position books in the market.31 Tamburlaine is the earliest surviving playbook of a play we know was a great success in the theater. The title page of the 1590 edition gives good examples of many of the features used for marketing playbooks, combining in one volume many features that later differentiate playbooks from one another. The title is long—a little narrative summing up the major action of the play: “Tamburlaine the Great. Who, from a Scythian Shephearde, by his rare and woonderfull Conquests, became a most puissant and mightye Monarque. And (for his tyranny, and terrour in Warre) was tearmed, The Scourge of God.” The stationer emphasizes the popularity of the plays in the theater—the two parts “were sundrie times shewed vpon Stages in the Citie of London.” He names the acting company. He characterizes the plays
PLAYBOOKS AND THE READING PUBLIC
Figure 1. Title page of Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine (1590). This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library.
by genre as “two Tragicall Discourses.” And he assures the shopper that this book is new—“Now first, and newlie published.” Jones completes the title page with his name as printer and the address of his shop, presumably one place where a shopper is certain to be able to find the volume. The title page is crowded, with little white space. Other than the reference to “the right honorable the Lord Admyrall, his seruantes,” nothing on the title page displays a concern for rank or status. But Jones’s epistle, discussed above, makes clear he expects the buyer of his book to be conscious of having a status superior to the ordinary theatergoer. That epistle is in Roman type; the body of the play is set in black letter. This first printing of Tamburlaine displays features that will come to point in divergent directions. During the course of the next two decades, some playbooks will sustain the emphasis on narrative and performance we see in Tamburlaine, and others will emphasize, as Tamburlaine also does, that they want to attract a sophisticated reader. In the decades after Jones prints Tamburlaine, we see a division in which some playbooks look “mixed,” as does Tamburlaine, others “theatrical,” and others “literary.” This division, I believe, reflects a
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Figure 2. Title page of Ben Jonson, Every Man Out of His Humor (1600). This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library.
stationers’ strategy of marketing plays to particular niches of the evolving reading public. But this division is also a process of evolution. After 1610, the “theatrical” style virtually disappears for newly printed plays, and almost all playbooks are “literary,” though older “theatrical” plays continue to be reprinted in their original format. How do these looks differ? I call a play “literary” if it has some or all of the following qualities: a brief rather than elaborately narrative title, an author’s name on the title page with some sort of designation of status for the author (such as “gentleman” or “Master of Arts”), Latin on the title page, a reference to university performance, an unusual amount of white space on the title page, and paratextual materials such as epistles or dedications. A play is “theatrical” if it has a narrative form of title, reference to the performing company and the absence of the literary features I list above. A playbook that combines features from both my lists I call “mixed.” Note that I am not using the word “literary” as Lukas Erne does, to assert that a writer intends a text for print as well as for performance.32 My terms refer to the marketing strategies of stationers, not the desires of authors. Though
PLAYBOOKS AND THE READING PUBLIC
Figure 3. Title page of William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (1600). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
literary and theatrical plays appeal to different segments of the market, both can presume some sophistication in their reader. I will give two examples, and then a table. One of the earliest strikingly literary playbooks is Ben Jonson’s 1600 Every Man Out of His Humor. Unusually even among the plays I call literary, Every Man Out implicitly criticizes its theatrical antecedents by not only omitting the name of the acting company (the Lord Chamberlain’s Men) but by saying the text contains “more than hath been Publickely Spoken or Acted.” One part of the paratextual material—“the seuerall Character of euery Person”—gets mentioned on the title page. The author is identified, if only by his initials; we see a Latin tag. Another play of the same year, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, looks theatrical. The elaborate narrative title is the play’s defining feature; the volume has no paratexts. Table 1 shows the frequency with which mixed, theatrical, and literary playbooks appear among plays printed for the first time in the years between 1590 and 1615.
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Table 1. Playbooks, 1590–1615
Year
Mixed
Theatrical
Literary
Total
1590
1
1
1591
1
1
1
3
1592
2
3
0
5
1593
0
2
0
2
1594
2
10
5
17
1595
1
3
0
4
1596
1
1
0
2
1597
3
1
0
4
1598
2
4
0
6
1599
2
6
0
8
Total 1590–99
15
32
6
53
1600
5
5
4
14
1601
2
3
2
7
1602
2
4
4
10
1603
1
0
1
2
1604
1
1
1
3
1605
5
6
2
13
1606
4
3
2
9
1607
8
2
9
19
1608
4
1
7
12
1609
5
1
0
6
Total 1600–09
37
26
32
95
1610
0
0
3
3
1611
4
0
2
6
1612
0
0
6
6
1613
0
0
5
5
1614
0
0
1
1
1615
0
0
3
3
Total 1610–15
4
0
20
24
2
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During the years the table tallies, the number of literary playbooks increases strikingly. A minor presence in the 1590s, they become more numerous than theatrical plays in the first decade of the new century and virtually the only kind of playbook between 1610 and 1615. Though their proportion of the market for playbooks decreases, theatrical volumes remain a steady presence for the first two decades and then almost disappear. Mixed playbooks follow the same pattern. The array of resources stationers use to attract book buyers first grows more varied and then contracts.33 The direction of these changes suggests that as time goes on more and more plays are marketed in print to potential readers like Dekker’s gallant— readers who are impressed by Latin tags and want to feel affiliated with the people of high status addressed in epistles or to whom plays are dedicated. Such readers take pleasure in Fletcher’s scornful remarks in the paratexts of The Faithful Shepherdess or in Jonson’s hostility to the “reader in ordinarie” of Catiline. They are the sort of people who would have responded in the theater to jokes about the social status or taste of the audience. Such jokes abound in the Induction to Bartholomew Fair (1614; not printed until 1631). Though seeking a different kind of buyer, theatrical plays and playbooks have some sophistication as well, though the signs of that sophistication are likely to be visible in the text rather than title page or paratexts. Often the sophistication takes the form of theatrical self-referentiality—a knowingness, frequently jokey, about other plays. A Warning for Fair Women is a domestic tragedy performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s men, probably in 1599, and printed in the same year in a theatrical quarto. The play begins with a debate among History, Tragedy, and Comedy about who shall preside over the story about to be performed. Though the story of A Warning is a notably down-market tale of greed and murder, its audience apparently had a taste for relatively sophisticated debate about genre.34 Mucedorus, the most often reprinted play of the period, hardly seems aimed at a sophisticated audience, but it too participates in controversy that foregrounds genre.35 The 1598 title page is thoroughly theatrical, with a narrative title that tempts the shopper (“most pleasant comedie” and “very delectable and full of mirth”), a heavy border surrounding the text, and assurance that the play has been acted in the City of London, though without specificity about acting company or venue. On the verso of its title page Mucedorus includes both a list of characters and a doubling chart, implying that amateur performers might purchase the book. In this respect the playbook resembles those “offered for acting” in the middle of the sixteenth century.36 The next leaf begins a debate between Comedy and Envy. Envy
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speaks of violence and bloodshed; Comedy taunts him with trying “to quaile a womans mind.” She says, Comedie is mild, gentle, willing for to please, And seekes to gaine the loue of all estates. Delighting in mirth, mixt all with louely tales, And bringeth things with treble ioy to passe. (A2v)
Unlike literary plays, this theatrical comedy tries to efface rather than enforce divisions of rank or “estates” within an audience. At the end of the play, Comedy expresses pleasure with her success, and they both join in prayer for Queen Elizabeth, her council, nobility, commons and subjects (F4r and v). When printed for the third time in 1610, Mucedorus continues to have the bordered title page of earlier editions and to mention “the merry conceites of Mouse.” But the title page now says the play is “Amplified with new additions, as it was acted before the Kings Maiestie at White-hall on Shroue-sunday night. By his Highnes Seruantes usually playing at the Globe.” Court performance by a distinguished company is part of the marketing plan. Leaf A ii is a new prologue addressed to the King, followed by a revised cast list and doubling chart taking account of changes in the script. The 1610 version makes substantial changes in the concluding dialogue between Comedy and Envy. In lines added in 1610, Envy says: From my foule Studie will I hoyst a Wretch, A leane and hungry Neager [“Meager” in 1613] Canniball: Whose iawes swell to his eyes, with chawing Malice: And him Ile make a Poet. .............................. This scrambling Rauen, with his needie Beard, Will I whet on to write a Comedie, Wherein shall be compos’d darke sentences, Pleasing to factious braines. And euerie other where, place me a Iest, Whose high abuse, shall more torment then blowes: Then I my selfe (quicker then Lightning) Will flie me to a puisant Magistrate, And waighting with a Trencher, at his backe, In midst of iollitie, rehearse those gaules, (With some additions) so lately vented in your Theator: He vpon this, cannot but make complaint, To your great danger, or at least restraint. (F3)
Envy threatens to find a poet, incite him to satiric comedy, and then complain to a magistrate who will retaliate by restraining theater. Warring with
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generous-spirited Comedy, Envy invents and then restrains Ben Jonson. Astonishingly, Mucedorus, that apparently naïve and old-fashioned romantic comedy, seems by 1610 to want to take up arms in the poets’ war. We seem to be in the presence of theatrical and literary gossip I earlier said was characteristic of volumes that were marketed as literary. But in the context of Mucedorus, Envy’s sophistication is something to mock and pity, not admire. Comedy replies: Com. Ha, ha, ha, I laugh to heare thy folly; This is a trap for Boyes, not Men, nor such, Especially desertfull in their doinges, Whose stay’d discretion, rules their purposes. I and my faction doe eschew those vices. (F3v)
In lines presumably spoken by the King’s Men both at the Globe and at court, Comedy dismisses satire as a juvenile vice. Mucedorus displays sophistication both about theatrical genre and (in 1610 and after) about theatrical history. Its audience knows the sting of mockery by those who deem themselves of elevated taste and is prepared to relish a retaliatory attack by a broader-minded version of comedy. The retaliatory attack directs us back to boy actors as a way of criticizing malicious authors. The imagined audience is theatrical but not naïve. And the theatrical audience for Mucedorus in 1610 needs an alternative market as its antagonist. Just as literary playbooks are marketed as not theatrical, so Mucedorus is marketed as not literary. No doubt Mucedorus, a theatrical play taking a polemical stance towards rival actors, is a special case. But various forms of self-awareness about the history of the theater are common in often-reprinted plays. Dekker’s Shoemaker’s Holiday (1600) has the distinctly down-market Sibyl say, “Go by, Jeronimo, go by,” quoting The Spanish Tragedy as she talks with Rose, daughter of the Lord Mayor of London and beloved of the nephew of the Earl of Lincoln.37 Shakespeare’s Richard of Gloucester refers to himself as a Vice; Prince Hal makes the same charge against Falstaff in the similarly popular Henry IV, Part One. These plays assume an audience alive to metadramatic games and taking pleasure in theatrical echoes. Even How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad (1602) appears—at least to this reader—to have some fun at the expense of Romeo and Juliet (1597).38 The wicked husband, Young Arthur, poisons his Griselda-like virtuous wife so he will be free to marry his whore, Mary. Sappy and maladroit Anselme loves the apparently deceased Mistress Arthur, and like County Paris and Romeo he comes to her in the tomb to give her a farewell kiss.
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PETER BEREK First with this latest kisse I seale my love. Her lips are warme, and I am much deceiu’d If that she stirre not: ô this Golgotha, This place of dead mens bones is terrible.39
To Anselme’s astonishment, the “poison” bought of an apothecary turns out to have been a sleeping draught. Mistress Arthur rises from her bier and her survival reforms Anselme and eventually teaches her wayward spouse the lesson offered in the play’s title. The many reissues of this silly play may have been in part associated with its ringing changes both on domestic tragedy (one thinks of The Miseries of Enforced Marriage [1607] and A Yorkshire Tragedy [1608]) and on Romeo and Juliet. Plays of the kind I have been discussing persist in the market for printed playbooks even during the time when new plays overwhelmingly appear in a literary format. Stationers apparently believed some potential book buyers found them appealing. These book buyers, one presumes, were not interested in strategies for affiliating themselves with those of high status. They may well have been attracted to playbooks that looked like the ones they had bought in the past. They may even have been skeptical about the pretensions of new and luxurious fashions. Notably, some of the most frequently reprinted plays were theatrical: Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part One (six reprints before 1615), Mucedorus (six reprints before 1615), The Spanish Tragedy (seven reprints), and If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, part 1 (five reprints). It would have been cheap and easy to modify title pages to accommodate new fashion; that no such thing happened suggests a market in which stationers could make money by playing stodgy Buicks and trendy Audis against one another. What has sometimes been seen simply as the conservatism of printers is in fact a strategy of marketing. The White Devil (1612) nicely exemplifies how a divided potential audience can become part of a marketing strategy. Stationers Nicholas Oakes (the printer) and Thomas Archer (the bookseller) give Webster’s play a narrative title page of the kind I have been calling theatrical, but they add a Latin tag. When the browser turns the title leaf, he or she sees Webster’s epistle “To the Reader,” in which the author complains that his play was acted in “so open and blacke a Theater, that it wanted (that which is the onely grace and setting out of a Tragedy) a full and understanding Auditory: and that since that time I have noted, most of the people that come to that Play-house, resemble those ignorant asses (who visiting Stationers shoppes their use is not to inquire for good bookes, but new bookes)” (A2r). Webster first insults the theatergoers who failed sufficiently to admire his play and then proclaims (as Jonson did in Catiline) that he seeks a “reader extraordi-
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Figure 4. Title page of John Webster, The White Devil (1612). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
nary.” The epistle, repeatedly turning to Latin, continues by explaining the author has deviated from proper classical tragic models because of the incapacities of his audience. Then Webster proclaims the canon of English playwrights by whose light he wishes to be read: Chapman, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher (all of whom he praises for style, understanding and excellence), and Shakespeare, Dekker, and Heywood (whom he praises—perhaps with slight condescension?—for their industry) (A2v). Notably, the first four writers he mentions usually appear in print in literary format, the last three in theatrical. In its impatience with performance and insistence on generic discourse, Webster’s epistle has much in common with Fletcher’s dedication to The Faithful Shepherdess. Webster seeks readers versed in the classics and sophisticated about the current theatrical scene and market for printed plays. Why the narrative title page? Perhaps to capitalize on whatever topical interest remained in a thirty-year-old story of scandal. Or perhaps to make a gesture to those “ignorant asses” who attended the play at the downmarket Red Bull theater, some of whom surely were readers and buyers of playbooks. Webster may not mind having some of the readers who usually
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read Shakespeare, Dekker, and Heywood. Segmenting a market is a good way to sell products; so too, occasionally, can be reaching across barriers. Whether or not it reaches across the barriers for which I argue, the book of The White Devil certainly markets rivalry. The While Devil has some similarities to one of the most puzzling instances of printing a play, Troilus and Cressida. Troilus, printed in 1609, survives with two very different title pages.40 Each title page suggests a different strategy for finding a reading audience. Both are spare, and in the lower half of the page they use the same setting of type for saying “Written by William Shakespeare,” a printer’s ornament, the names of printer and booksellers, and the date. Above Shakespeare’s name, the first version reads, “The Historie of Troylus and Cresseida. As it was acted by the Kings Maiesties servants at the Globe.” In language as well as typography this version has more in common with literary title pages than with the usual presentation of Shakespeare’s plays. But booksellers Bonian and Walley, or printer George Eld, or perhaps all three, cancelled this title page and substituted another: “The Famous Historie of Troylus and Cresseid. Excellently expressing the beginning of their loves, with the conceited wooing of Pandarus, Prince of Licia.” The format now is narrative, and the page promotes a notable character in a way familiar from Merchant of Venice and other theatrical plays. Yet the new title page omits any mention of performance. This second state of the Troilus quarto complicates the puzzle created by its title page with an astonishing literary epistle on a new leaf. The “never writer” who pens the epistle begins, “Eternall reader, you have here a new play, never stal’d with the Stage, never clapper-clawd with the palmes of the vulgar, yet passing full of the palme comicall” (¶2 r). The epistle seeks a literary reader in part by claiming Troilus is too good for the stage, in part by classifying this play with the comedies of Terence and Plautus, and in part by characterizing Shakespeare’s writings in print as what we would call “collectibles.”41 (“When hee is gone, and his Commedies out of sale, you will scramble for them” [¶2 v]). The claim—so far as we know, false—that Troilus was never acted suggests that the booksellers envision a reader who collects literature by admired authors for his or her library, not a playgoer interested in preserving the experience of performance. Troilus by 1609 is about eight years old, and we have no record of performances after its initial appearance. As with The Faithful Shepherdess and with The Knight of the Burning Pestle in 1613, the second state of Troilus implies that theatrical success is a sign of deplorable and vulgar popular appeal.42 Notoriously, Troilus is unlike other Shakespeare plays, except perhaps for the other so-called “problem plays,” Measure for Measure and All’s Well that
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Ends Well, both unprinted until the 1623 Folio. Troilus may not have had much appeal to Shakespeare’s usual market; Bonian and Walley may have been trying to reshape that market with their epistle even as they flattered it with their narrative title. They knew that the title page and epistle were important resources for marketing their book. Perhaps they changed their minds about their best marketing strategy. Or perhaps they deliberately produced alternate versions of the play, targeted at different audiences. Or perhaps they tried to produce a product that sent attractive signals to both markets—a play that could be simultaneously a Buick and an Audi. What Bonian, Walley, and Eld had in mind is not now knowable. Nonetheless, Troilus suggests that printers and booksellers perceived a divided audience for books of plays, addressed each audience in different ways, and at least sometimes saw debate about taste as a marketing strategy. Hamlet, a play this essay has been evading, is also suggestive on the subject of divisions in the market. The play discusses the effect on the theatrical market of what Rosencrantz told Hamlet was a “late innovation.”43 Companies of professional boy actors, dormant since the 1580s, around 1600 began performing once weekly, indoors, for a much smaller audience than attended the outdoor theaters.44 By 1610 the boys were again silent and the men had begun to perform in venues such as Blackfriars where the “little eyases” (Hamlet, 2.2.339) once perched. Despite the anxieties of the players in Hamlet, “the wars of the theaters” or “the Poets’ war” were good for business.45 But Hamlet’s dialogue with the players is not conspicuous to a browser. Curiously, the 1603 “bad” quarto of Hamlet on its title page announces that the play has been performed in the two universities of Oxford and Cambridge—a status-seeking literary formula not seen elsewhere in Shakespeare quartos. But the title page also uses the old-fashioned theatrical formula, “The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke.” The title page is mixed. The “good” quarto of 1604 returns the play to the theatrical style usual for Shakespeare. Were Q1 stationers Nicholas Ling and John Trundle trying to appeal to a new kind of audience? That is the persuasive argument of Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass, based not on the title page but on the “commonplacing” in the text.46 Divisions in the market for plays may help explain why Shakespeare’s presence in the book market diminishes after 1600. The development of a segmented market after 1600 may have encouraged stationers to seek out plays that appealed to one extreme or the other of reading taste. And that may have diminished the likelihood of printing for plays that fell between those extremes. (I am now talking about the action of plays, not about features of their printing.) Following a suggestion by R. A. Foakes, Lukas
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Erne argues that the fashion for plays by boys may have diminished interest among those who could afford to buy books in plays of the popular theater. Perhaps, says Erne, that explains why plays such as As You Like It and Twelfth Night remained unprinted until the 1623 folio.47 But in fact, while satiric comedies acted by boys were popular in the first decade of the new century, there was also an active market for popular, sentimental comedies such as Mucedorus, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, and How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad.48 Shakespeare’s comedies may have lacked appeal for printers, not because they were unlike plays performed by boys, but because they lacked the edge of appealing to one or the other segment of the market. Curiously, the first printing of King Lear may support this speculation. The 1608 quarto of Lear has an elaborate narrative title page.49 The volume markets itself to a theatrical audience and effaces its tragic nature by calling itself “true chronicle history.” Lear, the only Shakespeare tragedy to be printed between Hamlet and the early efforts to collect Shakespeare’s plays in 1619, seems to aim at the audience for the old King Leir (ca. 1588–94, printed 1605) or for English chronicle plays. Perhaps this strategy seemed the best available to the stationers.50 The other tragedies that reached print between Hamlet and 1615—Jonson’s two tragedies, Chapman’s Bussy plays, some Marston, some domestic plays, closet plays by Alexander, Daniel, and Elizabeth Cary, Webster’s White Devil, The Revenger’s Tragedy—are quite different in style and subject from the unprinted Othello, Macbeth, Antony, and Coriolanus. Some of these printed tragedies seem to aim at a particularly sophisticated audience; others, such as the domestic plays, are equally conspicuously down-market, like the 1608 Lear. Lukas Erne may be right in suggesting that Shakespeare thought of his plays as “literature” and anticipated their eventual publication in a collection. Yet whatever Shakespeare intended, stationers may not have imagined a profitable audience for these plays in the first decade of the 1600s. In tragedy as in comedy, Shakespeare seemed to fall between divided markets.51 Lesser and Stallybrass, writing about commonplacing and literariness, suggest that with Pericles Shakespeare aligned himself with the new vogue for tragicomedy and in doing so turned away from the Latinate ideas of literariness embraced by John Bodenham or Ben Jonson. Leonard Digges in Benson’s 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s poems associates commonplacing with plagiarism and celebrates Shakespeare not for being like a classic, but for native wit and an art that is without art.52 But Fletcherian tragicomedy, as exemplified by The Faithful Shepherdess, is self-consciously artful and seems to seek a literary audience. Moreover, Pericles isn’t marketed as a tragicomedy; modern readers and scholars choose to think of it that way, but in a
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1609 bookstall the play looked very different from The Faithful Shepherdess, as I have earlier suggested. The title page seems meant to appeal to the sort of readers who made Mucedorus so popular. No doubt Lesser and Stallybrass are right about the way Shakespeare looked to readers in 1640; Milton called him “fancy’s child” who “warbled his native woodnotes wild.” In the rapidly changing culture of print, post-Folio Shakespeare is a very different figure from the actor-writer of 1609. There are no prefatory poems or dedications in Pericles, and its popularity reinforces my point about the absence from the bookstalls of other Shakespeare plays. By 1612, a certain theatrical knowingness seems part of the print culture for plays by both boys and men. Perhaps the closure of the boy companies redirected toward the amphitheaters some energies previously released indoors. But more likely, twenty-five years of flourishing public theater in London, and twenty years of plays in print, had created audiences ready to take pleasure in knowledge about theatrical history and performance and to use that knowledge in flattering their taste. Jonson’s “reader extraordinary” may have become more common. But the tastes of readers, like the tastes of theatergoers, are multiple, and the audiences for playbooks divided.
The Audience, the Market and the Public Sphere What is at stake in this division of the audience? Ultimately, I think, the question is which participants in the market for plays have the right to control meaning. Enlisting the aid of Michael Warner (who develops Jurgen Habermas’s idea of “the public sphere”), but with Ben Jonson as theorist-inchief, I will suggest that the existence of conflict about the right to control meaning, rather than any particular resolution of that conflict, helps create a reading public.53 While acknowledging the many meanings of the word “public,” Warner concentrates on “the kind of public that comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation.”54 Such a public, Warner says, is “self-organized”: “an addressable object is conjured into being in order to enable the very discourse that gives it existence” (51). Though a public is imaginary, it has some social basis (55). It is a relationship among strangers. “We might recognize ourselves as addressees, but it is equally important that we remember that the speech was addressed to indefinite others” (58). A public creates itself by the act of paying attention; becoming part of a public is a voluntary activity, not entirely constrained by social conditions. Importantly, “a public is the social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse” (62). Warner is at pains to argue that it is the circulation of texts, not just their creation or
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printing, which helps constitute a public. For that reason, he gives special emphasis—as I do not—to “regular and dated papers, magazines, almanacs, annuals, and essay serials” (66). Like Habermas’s own arguments, Warner focuses on activities characteristic of the Restoration and eighteenth century. But some of what he discusses occurs in years pertinent to my essay, especially an “intertextual environment of citation and implication” (68) of the kind that existed among playbooks. Paradoxically, though the selforganized qualities of a public set it apart from a social world outside that public, the openness of public discourse to strangers “puts at risk the concrete world that is its given condition of possibility” (81). A public, created by being addressed, both defines a group of insiders and insists that all can hear the address that defines that group. The tensions visible in Every Man Out of His Humor about the right to make meaning are similar to those Warner sees in the creation of a public. I have already said that Every Man Out of His Humor in print is a notable event because of the way it asserts the primacy of reading over acting and the authority of the writer rather than the acting company.55 But the experience of reading is itself multiple and self-reflexive—it involves intertextual awareness of the immediate text, of other versions of that text, and of multiple performances linked to those texts. Yet that awareness, in some way empowering the reader to create his own meaning, is paradoxically itself a creation of the author. We see both the author’s assertion of control and at the same time his relinquishing of control in the way Jonson’s 1600 printed text offers us two endings for the play. The relationships of authority, both in print and performance, grow even more self-reflexive when Jonson reprints Every Man Out in his 1616 folio. As first performed in the theater, Every Man Out brought an actor playing the Queen onstage, to the displeasure of at least some auditors. Jonson revised the ending to avoid what some saw as the impropriety of staging a living monarch. Revising the play for his 1616 Folio, Jonson printed an additional account of how Every Man Out ended when staged at court in 1599 with the Queen herself in attendance.56 All these texts seem to suggest that the author in print, freed of the constraints created by actors and theater audiences, can have a control over meaning he lacks in the theater. But because print offers the reader choices not available in the theater, it also suggests that by virtue of purchasing the book the reader acquires control. Moreover, the play itself dramatizes the process of creating interpretive communities—communities comprised of shifting groups of characters on stage. By the reflexive or intertextual process of printing alternative endings for his play Jonson may be locating control, not solely in himself
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as author, but in a relationship of negotiation between writer and bookowning reader, or even multiple readers. By doing so, Jonson in 1600 seems to be imagining something like Habermas’s “public sphere” as the realm in which his work can have its effects. Jonson, by implying that print changes the creation of meaning, seems to envision what Michael Warner speaks of in his essay: “the kind of public that comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation.” Of course I’m deploying a vocabulary at least in part anachronistic. But I’m responding to the play’s quite extraordinary layering of resources to assert control over meaning. The very abundance of resources for control has the effect of making the printed play enact contestation over control. “The Author B. J.” is the first to assert control on the title page of Every Man Out, scoring points against the unnamed acting company that chose to speak or act publicly less than he had written. But as we open the volume authority becomes more dispersed and more problematic. Overleaf from the title page the reader finds “The names of the actors” arranged in a frame with “Asper, the presenter” at the top, “Grex” comprised of Cordatus and Mitis on the bottom, and four vertical columns of characters’ names in between. “The names of the actors” begins to shape the reader’s perceptions before we read a word of text. But most notable are the framing presenter and the “Grex” or chorus. By framing other actors, Asper, Mitis, and Cordatus implicitly possess a knowledge superior to those who are merely actors. The next page begins a set of characters—prose sketches and judgments of each character in the play. Asper comes first, followed by Macilente; Cordatus and Mitis, the figures who comprise the Grex, appear four pages later at the end. Not part of the play-script, these character sketches seem an effort by the author to impose a judgment untainted by the vagaries of actors and their auditors. On the final pages of characters appears what Helen Ostovich calls an “advertisement”: “It was not near his thoughts that hath published this either to traduce the author, or to make vulgar and cheap any the peculiar and sufficient deserts of the actors; but rather (whereas many censures fluttered about it) to give all leave and leisure to judge with distinction.”57 We do not know whether the writer of this advertisement was stationer William Holme or Jonson himself. But the speaker (like Every Man Out itself) is in some anxiety about the fluttering of “censures”—of the right to make meaning. The 1611 quarto of Catiline suggests what Jonson or Holme may have in mind. First, addressing “The Reader In Ordinarie,” Jonson defines the limitations of his rights: “The Muses forbid, that I should restrayne your medling, whom I see already busy with the Title, and tricking over the
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leaves: It is your owne. I departed with my right, when I let it first abroad.” Though he has departed with his right by letting his book be sold, Jonson feels no obligation to respecting the bad taste of the reader in ordinary. The commendation of such a reader is worthless to him: “The commendation of good things may fall within a many, their approbation but in a few: for the most commend out of affection, selfe tickling, an easinesse, or imitation: but men judge only out of knowledge. That is the trying faculty.” Letting the ordinary reader proceed as he wishes, Jonson commends his book instead to “the Reader extraordinary.”58 Such a reader alone has “the trying faculty.” Judging—“the trying faculty”—is presumably what one needs to make meaning aright. Judging with distinction—judging out of knowledge—is the subject of the astonishing 365-line Induction with which Every Man Out begins. Or rather, does not begin: Asper, Cordatus, and Mitis enter prematurely at the second sounding of the trumpet, before the third sounding that ordinarily signals the start of the play. Asper, clearly in some way representing “the Author B. J.,” proclaims the corrective purpose of this “comical satire.” During the course of this lengthy Induction he defines the nature of humors, the history of stage comedy since Aristophanes, and the play’s intention to expose and correct the excesses of its characters. Asper seems to think he is the maker of meaning. Yet what Mitis calls “the violence / Of your strong thoughts” (Induction, 45–46) displays its own form of excess. Rebuked by his onstage “audience” of Mitis and Cordatus, Asper apologetically addresses the “gracious and kind spectators” (49) he has just noticed in the theater. Asper calls unsuccessfully for the third sounding of the trumpet, asks Mitis and Cordatus to remain on stage during the play so they can speak their opinions to the spectators, and exits so he can become one of the players. Now constituted as the “Grex,” Mitis and Cordatus debate whether or not the play about to begin needs to observe the ancient laws of comedy. This community onstage and in the theater, not any individual, seems for the moment to construct meaning. When the third trumpet finally sounds, a Prologue enters, but he proclaims himself imperfect in his part and tells Mitis and Cordatus to speak for him. Instead, Carlo Buffone appears— someone new to the theater audience but known to readers from the Names of the Actors and the character sketches. Carlo Buffone drinks his wine and tells us about the boozy author who drinks with the players and has made a play called Every Man Out of His Humor. Carlo exits; Cordatus describes Carlo’s character to Mitis, and another actor enters alone. Mitis describes him as “Your envious man, Macilente, I think” (364). Macilente is played by Asper—or should I say, the same player plays both Asper and Macilente— or should I say, Asper and Macilente are both embodiments of the author
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described by Carlo Buffone? It is Macilente who finally begins the play. Every Man Out simultaneously insists on the importance of judging with distinction and raises doubts about who has the authority to judge, to define those with a right to judge, and otherwise make meaning. If the author, Ben Jonson, is the starveling bean-eater who drinks fortnightly with the players, as Carlo Buffone says, why should the theater audience credit his authority over the evidence of our own perceptions as we observe the stage action? We are participants in a community of players and auditors. Teased and taunted by Asper though it may be, the paying audience in the Globe each day judges anew and makes fresh meaning. But of course, the audience in the theater is as much a fictional part of the reader’s experience as the action on stage. As a buyer in the market for plays in print, the purchaser of Every Man Out owns the words alike of ostensible players, ostensible auditors. Readers in ordinary, thinking themselves equal to the sellers whose product they have bought, have the right to make of the text what they will, owing no deference to authority. The imperious title page is as much a text to be interpreted as the impersonation of Jonson by Asper or Macilente. But neither my argument nor Jonson’s play stops here. In the play as first acted—after five acts of humors on display, punctuated by comments from the Grex and culminating in a catastrophe of exposure—lean and envious Macilente sees Queen Elizabeth, and her sight chases all humors of envy and malice from him. Macilente praises the Queen and her kingdom and joins the Grex in the person of Asper. Authority melts from the author in the presence of Authority. Or, acknowledging that Elizabeth personated on stage is a creation of Jonson, Jonson melds his authority into that of the monarch. Not just the ruler of “the universal monarchy of wit” (as Carew said of Donne), the author B. J. by submitting to the monarch becomes monarch of all. Exposure of humors for purgation of humors is no mere call for self-rule; it is rule itself. Every Man Out, appearing both in the theater and in print at the time when the market for playbooks begins to divide, seems to invoke the Queen as a way of effacing all divisions and insisting upon unity of judgment and of meaning. Yet this theatrical ending appears in the 1600 quarto as secondary, prefaced by Jonson’s apologetic self-justification for having written an ending audiences took amiss. Printing alternate endings, Jonson reinvigorates his claims for the primacy of print over performance. He also implies that the book buyer, having shopped for the volume, has the right to judge the claims to meaning of rival endings. Jonson’s doing this also enacts what Michael Warner calls “the concatenation of texts through time” (62). Know-
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ingness about the history of performance—in this case, knowingness about the revision of Every Man Out—qualifies one for membership in a public capable of defining itself against the previously resistant and imperfectly knowing audience in the theater. In the alternative ending, Macilente spontaneously cures his humors and thanks, not the Queen, but a public comprised of Kind patrons of our sports (you that can judge, And with discerning thoughts measure the pace Of our strange muse in this her maze of humour, You whose true notions do confine the forms And nature of sweet poesy), to you I tender solemn and most duteous thanks For your stretched patience and attentive grace. (EMO, Appendix A, lines 14–20)
The audience to whom Macilente appeals can “judge with distinction”; it is a Globe version of what Jonson in Catiline called “the reader extraordinary.” But in print, the text juxtaposes Macilente’s speech with the alternate ending portraying the Queen. The playbook, unlike the performance, embodies conflict about its own ability to make meaning. As Warner says, “only when a previously existing discourse can be supposed, and a responding discourse be postulated, can a text address a public” (62). Jonson invents, or at least pleads for, a public that can occupy a sphere independent of the monarch and imagine meanings either like or unlike those the Queen imposes. One can also characterize what Jonson does in Every Man Out as performing in print the contrast between the audience in the theater and the market for books. For an audience is not the same as a market. An audience differs from a market by being both more relational and more hierarchical. At about the same time Every Man Out appears in print, Hamlet, dying, speaks of those who “are but mutes and audience to this act.”59 The onlookers who Hamlet says “tremble and look pale” are characters in the world of the play—like Hamlet himself they are visible on stage. At the same time, Hamlet seems aware of the people in the theater; he has, in all likelihood, spoken directly to them in his soliloquies. Those on stage with Hamlet are an “audience” in part because they are spectators, but also because they are in the presence of the now-dead king and the dying prince who would be king. Both king and prince are “giving audience.” They are participating in a social act bound up in hierarchy. In As You Like It, almost contemporary with Hamlet and Every Man Out, Jaques de Boys enters in the last scene and says, “Let me have audience for a word or two” (5.4.151). Jaques de Boys wants to “have audience” with the “court” assembled in Arden around Duke Senior. Like Hamlet, Jaques de Boys wants to give information that he
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hopes will change the behavior of his auditors. The act of having audience, like the act of giving audience, establishes a relationship. The community of the audience may be temporary, but it is real. By and large, OED definitions of “audience” accord with what I’m asserting. The contexts the definitions evoke are sometimes political, sometimes religious, sometimes personal. But to be in an audience is to be in a relationship with someone known and identifiable. Shopping, like theatergoing, establishes a face-to-face relationship. “Seller” and “buyer” are initially more than their market roles. The market cross, or market square, or market town, or covered market, are knowable sites for anyone. So is the bookshop. But while “having audience” or “giving audience” implies hierarchy, buying and selling in a market implies equality.60 Moreover, “market” as metaphor has a reductive effect. Hamlet asks, “What is a man, / If the chief good and market of his time / Be but to sleep and feed?” (4.4.32–34). Jenkins (Arden 2) glosses “good and market” as “advantage gained by the disposal of ” his time; Arden 3 cites Johnson, “that for which he sells his time.”61 A market, in both glosses, turns the intangible, time, into the tangible, goods or profitable service. Who has control or power in a market? Does control in a market affect the right to make meaning? Under conditions implying equality between buyer and seller, does anyone have such a right? In the eighteenth century, Adam Smith proposes an answer to my question about control: an “invisible hand.” The market itself not only has control, but also has a wisdom unattainable by individual participants in that market. “Market forces” have lives of their own, as in “the law of supply and demand.” We can no more identify human agency with those forces than we can associate human agency with the laws of motion or the force of gravitation. Smith’s concept of a market is vastly different from Elizabethan ideas of regulated markets. Whether hands are visible or invisible, whether markets are physical locations or abstract concepts, surely some form of control resides with those who own the property or money being exchanged. But to what extent can one sell or buy the right to make meaning? As reinterpreted by Michael Warner, the public sphere resolves the question not by offering an answer but by celebrating continued contest. Jonson both expects the reader to “give audience” to his authoritative presence and acknowledges that a hand invisible to his authorial vision may revise meanings beyond his own control. By deciding to print a text that embodies division of judgment as well as debate over grounds for judgment, Jonson seems to imply—not altogether gloomily—that there is value in a sphere of selfaware contestation: what Habermas argues by the end of the seventeenth
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century becomes a “public sphere.” No single authority, not even royal authority, can choke off debate in the market for books. Making meaning in the book market is less hierarchical than giving or having audience. Yet dramatized debate precludes any notion that the hand of the market is invisible: we see before us those asserting a right to judge. Analogously, I suggest, the visible divisions I have described among the readers addressed by printed playbooks simultaneously imply and advance the development of multiple self-aware reading publics. Jonson, of course, is a special case, and Every Man Out may even be a special case within the Jonson canon. But the strange posturing we see in Every Man Out in print appears in less elaborate form in the paratexts of the playbooks I have been calling “literary” and in the theatrical self-reflectivity of plays as different from them as Mucedorus. I spoke earlier of paratexts and title pages as strategies for positioning plays in the market for books in print. But marketing strategies, responding to an immediate context, also have long-term consequences. The strategies I describe here, by dividing the market, help turn that market into a reading public.
Amherst College
NOTES 1
Statistics come from Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks, http://deep.sas.upenn.edu. I do not count additional editions of plays appearing in the same year as the first edition, and treat as a single item multipart plays such as Tamburlaine printed in a single volume. The development of the theater and the book trade is lumpy, not linear; for claims about the special importance of the year 1594, see the essays collected in Shakespeare Quarterly 61 (2010). Though her interests are very different from those of this essay, Sonia Massai, “Shakespeare, Text and Paratext,” Shakespeare Survey 62 (2009): 1–11, reminds us of the importance of paratextual materials.
2
Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Part I in David Bevington et. al., eds., English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology (New York: Norton, 2002), 189. Richard Jones printed both parts of Tamburlaine together in 1590 in octavo format; strictly speaking by Greg’s standard the volume is a collection.
3
Cyrus Hoy, ed., The Faithful Shepherdess, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. Fredson Bowers, 10 vols. (Cambridge U. Press, 1976), 3:497.
4
Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge U. Press, 2004), esp. 52–80.
PLAYBOOKS AND THE READING PUBLIC 5
Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (New York: Macmillan, 1952). The classic rebuttal is Anne Jennalie Cook, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London, 1576–1642 (Princeton U. Press, 1981).
6
Roger Chartier describes a reading public for comedy in Golden Age Castile divided into the vulgo and the discreto. See “Reading Matter and ‘Popular’ Reading: From the Renaissance to the Seventeenth Century,” A History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (Amherst: U. of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 279.
7
H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers, 1558 to 1603 (Cambridge U. Press, 1965), 299–300, says the Stationer’s Company established in 1598 a price for books of between a penny for two sheets and a penny for one sheet and a half, depending on the font used. Most play quartos use eight to ten sheets. Peter Blayney points out that this was a wholesale price; the retail price was sixpence. See Peter W. M. Blayney, “The Publication of Playbooks,” A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (Columbia U. Press, 1997), 411.
8
Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge U. Press, 1991).
9
The interrelationship of taste and status is a chief subject of Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Harvard U. Press, 1984). See esp. 226–35.
10 Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 133–80. 11 See David Stoker, “‘To all Booksellers, Country Chapmen, Hawkers and Others’: How the Population of East Anglia Obtained Its Printed Materials,” Fairs, Markets and the Itinerant Book Trade, ed. Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (Newcastle, DE, and London: Oak Knoll Press and British Library, 2007), 107–36. 12 For a discussion of binding and its regulation, see Marjorie Plant, The English Book Trade, 3rd ed. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974), 206–15. 13 Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, 2.2.30–31, in Bevington, English Renaissance Drama. 14 John Wheeler, A Treatise of Commerce (1601) (New York: Columbia U. Press, 1931), 54. 15 Wheeler, Treatise of Commerce, 6–7. 16 David J. Baker, On Demand: Writing for the Market in Early Modern England (Stanford U. Press, 2010), 1–34, describes what he sees as two paradoxes. First, demand increased despite falling wages and rising prices. Following economic historian Jan De Vries, Baker suggests that householders redirected their efforts away from producing things for their own consumption and toward producing marketable goods. De Vries argues that individuals worked harder and that more members of the household worked; thus consumption and demand increased despite a difficult economy. Both theatrical performances and books were commodities that saw increasing consumption. The second paradox is that such growth in consumption occurred despite a prevailing ideology of frugality.
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PETER BEREK 17 Baker, On Demand, 21, 22. 18 For more information about condemnation of the retail trade, see Nancy Cox, “Beggary of the Nation: Moral, Economic and Political Attitudes to the Retail Sector in the Early Modern Period,” A Nation of Shopkeepers: Five Centuries of British Retailing, ed. John Benson and Laura Ugolini (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 26–51. 19 Bruno Blondé, Peter Stabel, Jon Stobart, and Ilja Van Damme, eds., Buyers and Sellers: Retail Circuits and Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2006). See esp. chap. 7, Derek Keene, “Sites of Desire: Shops, Selds and Wardrobes in London and Other English Cities, 1100–1500,” 125–154. A “seld” is like a modern covered market or arcade. 20 Ian W. Archer, “Material Londoners?” Material London, ca. 1600, ed. Lena Cowen Orlin (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 186. 21 John Middleton and Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl, 2.2.45, in Bevington, English Renaissance Drama. 22 Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions (1582), in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 4:218. 23 Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 4:276. 24 Thomas Dekker, The Gulls Hornbook (1609), F3v. 25 In an essay ultimately focusing on the 1623 Shakespeare folio, Gary Taylor describes the early modern bookshop as a place of performance. “Making Meaning Marketing Shakespeare,” From Performance to Print in Shakespeare’s England, ed. Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 55–72. 26 Peter W. M. Blayney, The Bookshops in Paul’s Cross Churchyard (London: Bibliographical Society, 1990), 10–11. 27 Giles Mandelbrote, “Workplaces and Living Spaces: London Book Trade Inventories of the Late Seventeenth Century,” The London Book Trade: Topographies of Print in the Metropolis from the Sixteenth Century, ed. Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (London: British Library, 2003), 27–28. 28 Claire Walsh, “Social Meaning and Social Space in the Shopping Galleries of Early Modern London,” Nation of Shopkeepers, 52–79; see esp. 62. 29 Vanessa Harding, “Shops, Markets and Retailers in London’s Cheapside, c. 1500–1700,” Blondé, Stabel, Stobart, and Van Damme, Buyers and Sellers, 155, 159.
PLAYBOOKS AND THE READING PUBLIC 30 See Paul J. Voss, “Books for Sale: Advertising and Patronage in Late Elizabethan England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 29 (1998): 733–56. Alan Farmer and Zachary Lesser collect information about marketing and title pages in “Vile Arts: The Marketing of English Printed Drama, 1512–1660,” RORD 39 (2000): 77–165. In his history of copyright, Joseph Loewenstein, The Author’s Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright (U. of Chicago Press, 2002), 63–64, writes: “the title page advertises: it proposes the ready-made book, instigating a literary transaction that begins with purchase.” On an analogous subject, Tiffany Stern, “‘On Each Wall and Corner Poast’: Playbills, Title Pages and Advertising in Early Modern London,” ELR 36 (2006): 57–89, deploys the available evidence for using playbills as a means of advertising theatrical performances and shows that a small group of printers dominated the market for playbills. At the end of her essay she discusses the similarities between playbills and title pages (though her discussion is speculative, because no Early Modern playbills survive). David Bergeron, Textual Patronage in English Drama, 1570–1640 (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2008), 1–46, studies stationers’ epistles and writers’ dedications. 31 Henry Parrot’s 1615 The Mastive, H4r–I, in mocking visitors to a bookshop, makes it clear they are looking at books that can be browsed in a way familiar to modern readers. 32 Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge U. Press, 2003). 33 Readers who have made it this far in my essay will no doubt be aware of the debate about what reprint rates for playbooks tell us about the popularity and commercial success of playbooks. Peter Blayney, “Publication of Playbooks,” 383–422, and “The Alleged Popularity of Playbooks,” Shakespeare Quarterly 56 (2005): 1–32, argues that playbooks were relatively unpopular and a weak business investment for publishers. Alan Farmer and Zachary Lesser, “The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited,” Shakespeare Quarterly 56 (2005): 33–50, argue that, properly analyzed, reprints show plays were relatively successful commercially. Assessing their claims is beyond the scope of this essay. Because I am concerned with marketing strategies rather than with commercial success, I ignore reprints in Table 1. Many of the plays included in the table were reprinted; many were not. Reprintings almost invariably followed the title page format of the first edition, both in the years up to 1615 and after. 34 See Peter Berek, “‘Follow the Money’: Sex, Murder, Print, and Domestic Tragedy,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 21 (2008): 170–88. 35 Mucedorus has at least fourteen surviving editions before 1660, dated 1598, 1606, 1610, 1611, 1613, 1615, 1618, 1619, 1626, 1629, 1631, 1634, 1639, and n.d. but estimated by the ESTC as 1656 and 1668. Richard Proudfoot, “‘Modernizing’ the Printed Play-Text in Jacobean London: Some Early Reprints of Mucedorus,” “A Certain Text”: Close Readings and Textual Studies in Shakespeare and Others, in Honor of Thomas Clayton, ed. Linda Anderson and Janis Lull (Newark: U of Delaware Press, 2002), 18–28, identifies a previously unknown reprint of Mucedorus done sometime between 1613 and 1615. 36 The classic study of plays “offered for acting” is David Bevington’s From Mankind to Marlowe (Harvard U. Press, 1962). We know that some countrymen of Stanton-Harcourt parish performed Mucedorus in various venues around Christmas, 1651–52. At the White Hart Inn at Witny, during the performance a beam collapsed supporting the chamber in which three or four hundred people were watching the play. The events are described in John Rowe, Tragi-Comoedia. Being a Brief Relation of the Strange, and Wonderful hand of God discovered at Witny, in the Comedy acted there February the third, where there were some Slain, many Hurt, with severall other Remarkable Passages. Together with what was Preached in three Sermons on that occasion from Rom. 1.18. Both which May serve as some Check to the Growing Atheisme of the Present Age (Oxford, 1653).
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PETER BEREK 37 Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday scene 2, line 43, in Bevington, English Renaissance Drama, 497. Shoemaker’s Holiday is printed in 1600, 1610, 1618, 1624, 1631, and 1637. 38 How a Man May Choose is printed in 1602, 1605, 1608, 1614, 1621, 1630, and 1634. 39 How a Man May Chuse a Good Wife from a Bad, ed. A. E. H. Swaen (Louvain: A. Uystpruyst, 1912), lines 1913–17. 40 The printing history of Troilus, like the history of speculation about its two quarto title pages, is worth more attention than I can give in an already lengthy essay. See Troilus and Cressida, ed. David Bevington (London: Thomas Nelson, 1998), esp. 1–4, 87–90, 398–405, and Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication, 1–4. 41 Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge U. Press, 2002), 26–28, offers a rich discussion of the rhetorical complexities of the epistle. 42 See Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication, 52–80. 43 Hamlet, 2.2.333. 44 Precision in these matters is not attainable, but the outdoor theaters used by adult male actors held 1,000–3,000 auditors, while the indoor theaters held somewhere between 50 and 900. See Ann Jennalie Cook, “Audiences: Investigation, Interpretation, Invention,” in Cox and Kastan, New History of Early English Drama, 314. 45 There is some overlap between the story I’m telling and the story of “the poets’ war,” but that war is only part of my narrative. James P. Bednarz, Shakespeare & the Poets’ War (New York: Columbia U. Press, 2001), esp. 1–18 and 273, persuasively argues that this “war” is chiefly a contest in which Jonson advocated, and Shakespeare resisted, an overtly didactic model for comedy and for theater. Occasionally, Jonson mocks his older and more celebrated precursor in plays that give comedy a new, satiric form. Eventually, says Bednarz, Shakespeare displays his own satiric skills in Troilus and Cressida while mocking Jonson in the person of Ajax. Bednarz is chiefly interested in what happened on stages and in playhouses before the first performance of Troilus in 1601. Yet Troilus doesn’t reach print until 1609, long after Bednarz thinks the poets’ war is over. Rivalry in print evolves on a different chronology from rivalry in the playhouse. 46 Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass, “The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (2008): 371–420. 47 Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, 102–8. R. A. Foakes, “Tragedy at the Children’s Theatres after 1600: A Challenge to the Adult Stage,” The Elizabethan Theatre, ed. David Galloway (Toronto: Macmillan, 1970), 39. 48 See note 35 for the printing history of Mucedorus.
PLAYBOOKS AND THE READING PUBLIC 49 M. William Shak-speare: his true chronicle historie of the life and death of King Lear and his three daughters With the vnfortunate life of Edgar, sonne and heire to the Earle of Gloster, and his sullen and assumed humor of Tom of Bedlam: as it was played before the Kings Maiestie at Whitehall vpon S. Stephans night in Christmas hollidayes. By his Maiesties seruants playing vsually at the Gloabe on the Bancke-side (London: Printed [by Nicholas Okes] for Nathaniel Butter, and are to be sold at his shop in Pauls Church-yard at the signe of the Pide Bull neere St. Austins Gate, 1608). 50 Douglas Brooks argues that by putting Shakespeare’s name at the top of the title page the printer was trying to affiliate the Lear quarto with plays of the sort I call “literary,” though Brooks does not use this term. I believe the rest of the title page suggests a different conclusion. See Brooks, “King Lear (1608) and the Typography of Literary Ambition,” Renaissance Drama 30 (1999): 133–59. 51 As You Like It was one of four plays listed in a “staying entry” in the Stationers’ Register, probably on August 4, 1600. The other three—Henry V, Much Ado, and Every Man in His Humor—were all printed shortly thereafter. See Loewenstein, Jonson and Possessive Authorship, 42. That AYL suffered a different fate than the other plays in this entry may support my speculation. 52 Lesser and Stallybrass, “First Literary Hamlet,” 418–20. 53 Jurgen Habermas’s influential account of the public sphere appeared in German in 1962. The English translation is The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). For extensive discussion of the usefulness of Habermas’s ideas in studying the early modern period, see The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, ed. Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (Manchester U. Press, 2007), and Making Publics in Early Modern Europe: People, Things, Forms of Knowledge, ed. Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin (New York: Routledge, 2010). Harold Mah, “Phantasies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of Historians,” Journal of Modern History 72 (2000): 168, writes: “Analysis of the public sphere should begin, I would suggest, with a recognition that its location is strictly in the political imaginary. The public sphere is a fiction, which, because it can appear real, exerts real political force. The enabling condition of a successfully staged public sphere is the ability of certain groups to make their social or group particularity invisible so that they can then appear as abstract individuals and hence universal.” 54 Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14 (2002): 50; subsequent citations appear in parentheses. 55 See Richard Dutton, Ben Jonson: Authority: Criticism (London: Macmillan, 1996), esp. 44, 50, 51. 56 All this information and much more for which I am indebted appears in Ben Jonson, Every Man Out of His Humor, ed. Helen Ostovich (Manchester U. Press, 2001). 57 Ostovich, Every Man Out, 111; subsequent citations of EMO appear in parentheses. 58 Ben Jonson, Catiline (1611), A3r.
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PETER BEREK 59 Hamlet, 5.2.319.The classic books on the audience for Elizabethan and Jacobean plays speak of the “audience” as those men and women who attended theatrical performances of stage plays. While Harbage in Rival Traditions and Cook in Privileged Playgoers disagree about the social rank of members of that audience, they agree that audiences are to be found in the theater. 60 Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge U. Press, 1986), traces the shifting usages of “market.” The medieval “market,” he writes, “suggests a more or less sharply delineated sphere of commerce, an experienced physical and social space.” Sixteenth-century meanings of the term grow more abstract, and by the end of the eighteenth century “market” becomes “a boundless and timeless phenomenon” (41). The drama of the Middle Ages, says Agnew, is seamlessly part of the fabric of social ritual. Renaissance theater stands apart, with performer and audience briefly linked by a quasi-contractual bond like that between buyer and seller, not by shared participation in a communal ritual (111). Agnew’s provocative linking of theater and marketplace may or may not be true in detail; his argument is not my subject. But I’m glad to embrace his sense that the years around 1600 show the idea of market in transition. 61 Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982); Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, 2 vols. (London: Thomson Learning, 2006).
Serials, Spinoffs, and Histories: Selling “Shakespeare” in Collection before the Folio Tara L. Lyons
I
n the theatrical season of 1590–91, the Lord Pembroke’s Men staged two plays that chronicled the demise of King Henry VI of England and dramatized episodes in the War of the Roses.1 The first play depicted a span of events from Henry VI’s marriage up to and including the initial York and Lancaster battle at St. Albans, from which Henry and his queen fled for their lives. Picking up where the former left off, at St. Albans, the second play dramatized the House of York’s victory over the House of Lancaster and concluded with Henry VI’s death and Edward IV’s ascension to the English throne. The plays were designed so that an audience could still enjoy one play without seeing the other.2 But, if a serial relationship between the plays was not immediately apparent for audiences in the theaters, then it surely emerged over time for readers in London booksellers’ stalls. In 1594, the text covering the early years of the conflict was purchased by the stationer Thomas Millington and printed in a quarto edition, aptly titled The First part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, with the death of the good Duke Humphrey: And the banishment and death of the Duke of Suffolke, and the Tragicall end of the proud Cardinall of Winchester, with the notable Rebellion of Jacke Cade: And the Duke of Yorkes first claime unto the Crowne (1594).3 Millington’s “First Part” implied the existence of a second or subsequent part, and, in the following year, he published this work, The true Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, and the death of good King Henrie the Sixt, with the whole contention betweene the two Houses Lancaster and Yorke: as it was sundrie times acted by the Right Honourable the Earle of Pembrooke his servants (1595).4 The publisher’s formatting for the two playbooks suggests that he envisioned selling them separately. Whereas The First Part was published in quarto format, The True Tragedy was published in octavo.5 Yet, when these first editions sold out at approximately the same rate, Millington recognized the potential for selling 185
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the plays together and likely in sequence, for he reissued both again in 1600 and this time in the same quarto format.6 This decision coincided with his and John Busby’s joint publication of another historical play about an English monarch, The Cronicle History of Henry the fift, With his battell fought at Agin Court in France. Togither with Auntient Pistoll (1600), which represented the king’s military feats and foreshadowed the civil wars that were to plague his son.7 Although performed by a different theater company, The Cronicle History of Henry the fift was a historical prequel to the Pembroke’s Men’s Henry VI series. By adding the Henry V play to his publishing oeuvre in 1600, Millington had for sale in his bookshop three quartos that featured cross-textual characters and plots during a span of English history from approximately 1415 to 1471.8 For another London stationer, these three plays were deemed more valuable together than apart. Later in 1600, the publisher Thomas Pavier entered “Henry the ffift” in the Stationers’ Register and in 1602 purchased from Millington the publishing rights to The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy.9 For the latter two plays, a single transfer in the Stationers’ Register unequivocally records ordinal titles for the playbooks, highlighting their serial nature and joint representation of the eponymous monarch: “The first and Second parte of Henry the VI ii books.”10 After publishing an edition of The Cronicle History of Henry the fift (1602), Pavier retained the rights of these three plays for seventeen years, and in 1619 issued all three again. The Cronicle History of Henry the fift (1619) appeared in an independent quarto, but Pavier fused the Henry VI plays into a single quarto edition entitled The Whole Contention betweene the two Famous Houses, Lancastar and Yorke the Tragicall ends of the good Duke Humfrey, Richard Duke of Yorke, and King Henrie the sixt. Divided into two Parts: And newly corrected and enlarged (1619).11 Only four years later, these three plays were published again as a set, this time in a collection with thirty-three other stage plays.12 These texts’ decades-long transmission highlights an often-overlooked phenomenon in the history of collecting and marketing early printed drama. Some playbooks that were “made” together, stayed together, and works that were performed in historical series in the theaters were readily acquired by London stationers who could capitalize on their narrative or character relationships. By highlighting and prescribing organizational frameworks for readers, booksellers could hawk their books in a variety of pairs, sets, and sequences.13 As R. M. Wiles writes, for early modern booksellers, “one way of multiplying the number of cash sales was to bring the same customers back repeatedly by publishing a cumulative series of little
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books, each one low in price, but collectively amounting to something.”14 And, as I show in this article, this “something” was often a set of works that could be linked as prequels and sequels or as source plays and spinoffs. In this way, collecting begins unfolding from small beginnings. After the overwhelming theatrical success of Christopher Marlowe’s twopart Tamburlaine in 1587–88, acting troupes began performing plays in a variety of serialized states, following the tried-and-true marketing strategy of giving customers “more of what they liked the first time.”15 The sheer number of serial plays during the 1590s and early 1600s—Nicholas Grene estimates that there were over forty-one part-plays in performance before 1616—confirms that companies were keen to reproduce plots, reintroduce characters, or compose a whole sequence to keep audiences coming back to the theaters. And playgoers’ demands for increasingly more plays dramatizing the lives of English kings, queens, or popular historical figures (whether labeled as “histories,” “tragedies,” “comedies,” or fusions of each) created a surge in the number of serials based on related historical material. If a sequel, prequel, or spinoff could draw audiences back to the theaters for another performance, then that same play in print had the potential to bring readers back to a stationer’s bookstall for the purchase of not just one book, but two or more.16 For a bookseller keen on publishing plays from the professional theaters in the 1590s, one could have done far worse than invest in serial historical drama.17 Seriality and historicity, however, are not the organizational frameworks that predominate in scholarship on early printed drama, nor do publishers’ sets like the Henry V-Henry VI series take precedence in studies of the English play collection, if they are even recognized as a collected form.18 Rather, critical studies fixate on another unifying principle—authorship—and look to large collected editions like the folios of Benjamin Jonson (1616) and William Shakespeare (1623) to understand what the play collection is, how it emerged, and how it signified.19 Critical narratives, for example, struggle to see plays like Henry V and the two-part Henry VI outside the framework of Shakespeare’s authorial apparatus and commonly overlook the fact that these plays were amassed and sold by individual booksellers and compiled by readers decades before any were ascribed to the author. The Henry VI pair had been in print for nearly twenty-five years before they were attributed to Shakespeare in 1619, and Henry V was not ascribed until 1623. As I show in the following pages, even when Shakespeare’s name begins appearing on the title pages of early quartos, we should assume neither that it was prioritized as a principle of collection nor that his authorship inspired the consolidation of his printed plays in the hands of publishing agents and
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readers.20 Indeed, if we resist the notion that Shakespeare’s authorship was a foregone conclusion in our studies of play collections and plays in collection,21 the multiplicity of reasons that agents accumulated printed drama come into view as do the variety of collected forms used to materially associate texts in the period, such as playbooks that were printed, marketed, or sold together based on their serial content; works that were amassed by a single stationer based on narrative continuities; two-part plays that traced a character’s travails in two different contexts; and tract volumes or Sammelbände compiled by readers that constructed a chronology of historical content.22 By approaching “collection” as a process that unfolds at separate moments over time, with no discernable teleology, I expose how the principles of seriality and historicity were centrifugal forces keeping works together, sometimes functioning independently, sometimes together, and oftentimes supported by—but not subordinate to—other principles of collection such as authorship. Here, I construct a genealogy of collection by focusing on the accumulation of plays that would later be enshrined as Shakespeare’s. By tracing the processes of assembly of the early quartos and the agents who accumulated them, I find that the principles of seriality and historicity, and not authorship, largely motivated their collection. The first section of this article addresses the publisher and bookseller, Andrew Wise, who published four serial historical plays from 1597 to 1602: Richard II, Richard III, and 1&2 Henry IV. Contrary to current critical accounts that privilege Wise’s interest in “Shakespeare” as an investment strategy, I demonstrate that before authorship was introduced as a potential collection principle, Wise was capitalizing on the popularity of historical plays that could be assemble into ordered series, which some early modern readers chose to collect and bind together.23 The stationer’s savvy approach to publishing and selling similar kinds of books supported his accumulation of a number of serial historical plays before 1602, which concomitantly aided in launching a correlation between serial historical drama and the author’s name in print. The second and third sections of this article attend to a more notorious publisher and collector of “Shakespearean” playbooks, Thomas Pavier. Along with his collaborators, Pavier released nine quartos in 1619, which critics argue were marketed as a “nonce collection” with “Shakespeare” as the unifying principle.24 What scholars have not noted before is that during the first decade of his career (1600 to 1610), seriality and historicity overwhelmingly informed Pavier’s investment in and collection of playbooks. These are the principles according to which Pavier first amassed the rights to copy to these plays, and the same principles are reflected in the selection
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and marketing of plays for the 1619 quartos project. “Shakespeare,” with his close affiliations with serial and historical drama, did not supplant these other principles in 1619, but emerged for booksellers and readers as an additional or even optional framework for collection. In the conclusion, I briefly illustrate how seriality and historicity did not disappear as unifying criteria once “Shakespeare” was adopted as a saleable principle of collection in 1623 but were repurposed by other agents during the processes of organizing the author’s corpus in and after the First Folio.
1 During his short six-year career as a London publisher, Andrew Wise consistently amassed the rights to publish serial histories performed by the Chamberlain’s Men.25 In October of 1597, Wise entered “The tragedie of kinge Richard the Third with the death of the duke of Clarence” in the Stationers’ Register and published in quarto The Tragedy of King Richard the third. Containing, His treacherous Plots against his brother Clarence: the pittiefull murther of his iunocent nephewes: his tyrannicall usurpation: with the whole course of his detested life, and most deserved death.26 Staged between 1591 and 1593, the tragedy was the Chamberlain’s Men’s response to the Pembroke’s Men’s series, which charted the downfall of Henry VI, the rise of the house of York, and Richard III’s nascent plots to pilfer the English crown.27 The Tragedy of King Richard the third picked up where the Pembroke’s Men’s Henry VI series left off and was thus a kind of cross-company sequel.28 When Wise sold his three editions of The Tragedy of King Richard the third between 1597 and 1602, the Henry VI series was slightly dated in the theaters but still well promoted in print by the recently released editions of Millington’s The First Part of the Contention (1594, 1600) and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (1595, 1600). That Wise had learned a trick or two from Millington seems likely, for Wise’s next playbook investments were not only serial history plays but also three works that charted events in three successive monarchs’ reigns. Earlier in 1597, Wise entered Richard II in the Stationers’ Register and hired Valentine Simmes to print the first quarto, The Tragedie of King Richard the second (1597).29 The play was staged by the Chamberlain’s Men play in 1595, and its success prompted the company to develop a narrative sequel, which was performed in the following season, 1596–97.30 Not surprisingly, when the sequel became available to publish, Wise acquired it. In 1598, he entered the play and hired Peter Short to print The History of Henrie the Fourth; with the battell at Shrewsburie, betweene the King and Lord Henry
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Percy, surnamed Henrie Hotspur of the North. With the humorous conceits of Sir John Falstalffe, which sold well enough for a second edition within the year and a third in 1599.31 Apparently, Wise was monitoring which plays in the theaters merited a sequel or prequel and then securing his rights to publish the next part in the series when it became available. This explains why Wise invested in The Second part of Henrie the fourth, continuing to his death, and coronation of Henrie the fift. With the humours of sir John Falstaffe, and swaggering Pistoll (1600).32 This sequel had been performed by the Chamberlain’s Men between 1597 and 1598 after the impressive success of the first part.33 By publishing The Second part of Henrie the fourth, Wise amassed three plays performed in three consecutive seasons (1595–98) tracing the fall of Richard II, the trials of Henry IV, Prince Hal’s maturation and coronation, and of a range of comedic episodes starring Falstaff and Pistol.34 With The Tragedy of King Richard the third flanking the set, Wise could offer readers an organized gathering of part-plays on English history based on a chronology of content. Of course, customers did not have to purchase the quartos together or read them in any such sequence. Each play was autonomous and sold as an independent playbook; even the two parts of Henry IV were sold in separate editions, with the first part selling more copies than the second. Nonetheless, period Sammelbände reinforce that readers did rely on the principles of historicity and seriality to organize their playbook purchases. For instance, Sir John Harington’s booklist from 1610 shows that he compiled a volume of thirteen different plays. The seventh, eighth, and ninth texts in the volume were three quartos recorded as “Henry the fourth. I,” “Henry the fourth: 2,” and “Richard ye. 3d:. tragedie.”35 Harington’s abbreviated titles foreground the reigning monarch in each play, allowing for assembly based on a chronology of titular English kings. Another booklist, this one created by Henry Oxinden, similarly shows evidence of an early reader serially arranging historical plays; within a grouping of twenty plays was the “Chronicle history of Hen. 5. 1600” (number 17 in the collection), “Ist part of Sr John oldcastle 1600” (number 18 in the collection), and “Ist part of the Chronicle between the 2 famous houses of york & Lancaster 1594” (number 19 in the collection).36 Even though Oxinden’s booklist is dated 1637, Giles Dawson proposes that these first-edition quartos were collected by another agent before 1610 and passed on to Oxinden.37 If this is so, then a very early reader was assembling three works that represented events in from approximately 1415 to 1455. While the compilers of the Harington and Oxinden collections may have decided on their own to cohere part-plays in their libraries, they were likely assisted by booksellers such as
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Thomas Millington and Andrew Wise who invested in these multiple parts and made them available for purchase in sets. Neither Harington’s nor Oxinden’s list designates the authors of these serial plays. As Roger Chartier and Peter Stallybrass argue, “when playpamphlets from the Renaissance have survived, it is usually because collectors treated them as plays rather than as authored texts and bound them together as miscellanies.”38 But, I would add that readers’ arrangement of plays was not always miscellaneous. Playbooks featuring historical moments were arranged in chronological sequences, and parts of series were unified. Both Harington’s and Oxinden’s lists, for instance, are peppered with pairs and groupings of serial plays, including Thomas Heywood’s 1&2 Edward IV as well as George Chapman’s two-part Byron plays.39 When a dramatist’s plays appear together in the Harington and Oxinden booklists (even when the author is left off the title page), it is more likely to be simply because the dramatist wrote multiple plays in a series. Similarly, for Andrew Wise, authorship was not an a priori principle steering selection and organization of texts, but it was nevertheless one unifying strategy that belatedly and perhaps inadvertently joined the other principles during the stationer’s processes of collection. When Wise published the first quartos of Richard II (1597), Richard III (1597), and 1 Henry IV (1598), the title pages carried no authorial attribution.40 The publisher’s impulse when investing in and marketing the three plays seems to have been their historical content and performance context, features that were highlighted on their title pages. Given that these first editions sold out within a year, Wise’s initial selling strategies were successful and recommended for future use. To the second editions of Richard II (1598) and Richard III (1598), however, Wise added another feature, Shakespeare’s name, and then proceeded to print the author on the bylines of the third quarto of 1 Henry IV (1599), the first edition of 2 Henry IV (1600), and the third quarto of Richard III (1602). By no means was “the author” a principle that would be expected to function on its own to sell Wise’s playbooks, but its emergence through the collection process could assist the publisher in vending these historical serial plays in sets to readers who valued uniformity. Indeed, adding an author’s name to a title page could provide readers with an extra incentive to purchase similar kinds of books, but only after at least one book in the set was a proven seller. Wise honed this strategy years before with a pair of sermons. After the publisher made an impressive return on three editions of A most excellent and heavenly sermon. Upon the 23. chapter of the gospell by Saint Luke, he added “by Thomas Playfere Doctor of Diuiniti” to the fourth edition in 1596 and changed the title to The meane
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in mourninge. A sermon preached at Saint Maryes Spittle in London on Tuesday in Easter weeke. 1595. The addition of the author’s name and alteration to the title can be explained by Wise’s publication of a second sermon in that same year, entitled The Pathway to Perfection A sermon preached at Saint Maryes Spittle in London on Wednesday in Easter weeke. 1593, which was printed with the same authorial attribution.41 The corresponding titles confirm that time of delivery (during the same week in the liturgical year) and place of delivery (Saint Mary’s Spittle) were attractive unifying features for the sermons and likely the initial draw for Wise’s investment. Playfere’s authorship on its own did not motivate interest and investment in these sermons, but likely materialized as a supplementary strategy to affiliate similar kinds of books and persuade readers to see the books as a desirable pair in his bookstall. And apparently he succeeded with at least one reader, for an extant volume bound in early seventeenth-century calfskin confirms that the sermons were maintained as a pair.42 When “Shakespeare” did emerge as a potential collection strategy for Wise, it was an effect of the author’s previous affiliations with serial, historical drama. In 1600, the stationer co-published Much Ado About Nothing with William Aspley and attributed the play to Shakespeare on its title page. As far as we know, Much Ado had no direct or indirect relationship to a series or offshoot, and it was clearly entered into the company’s registers as a “comedie.”43 On the other hand, it did share authorship and theater company with the other Wise quartos; both of these features apparently encouraged Wise and Aspley to invest in the playbook. Nonetheless, the “Shakespeare” known to Wise—the one that he affiliated with Richard II, Richard III, and 1 Henry IV—was very much a serial historical “Shakespeare.” Nicholas Grene, in Shakespeare’s Serial History Plays, argues that the playwright secured his fame as a dramatist because he was attuned to audiences’ desires for serial histories. This will come as no surprise to scholars who recall that it was the dramatist’s Henry VI plays that first brought him notoriety as the “upstart crow,”44 but Grene goes further to suggest that the author carefully selected material that was amenable to the production of dramatic sequels or prequels, anticipating the likelihood that a spinoff would be in demand.45 Embracing the trend for serial drama, perhaps even more so than his contemporaries, Shakespeare found success in the theaters but also in print, as publishers sold out multiple editions of his serial histories—and over a long period of time. In John Jowett’s words, “the 1590s history plays Richard II, Richard III, and 1 Henry IV made up the core of Shakespeare plays bought by Jacobean readers until 1623 and after.”46 In print it was the principles of seriality and historicity that brought “Shakespeare” into the world as an
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organizational framework for London stationers like Andrew Wise, one that would be adopted, reformulated, and rejected by future agents in their ongoing processes of collection.47
2 Thomas Pavier was one of these agents, best known for the set of nine quartos that he and printer William Jaggard published in 1619, eight of which were attributed to Shakespeare (two now deemed apocryphal) and some bearing fraudulent dates and imprints.48 Why Pavier and collaborators sought to deceive readers with erroneous title pages remains a contentious issue, but most critics agree that the dominant principle of collection and marketing allure of the quartos was Shakespeare’s authorship.49 This view, however, largely derives from approaching the 1619 quartos as a nascent manifestation of the Shakespeare Folio, either designed to pique readers’ interests in a more complete authorial volume or deemed a threat to the sale of this impending single-author collection.50 By challenging these teleological approaches and charting Pavier’s processes of collection during the first two decades of his career, we can see that seriality and historicity largely guided the stationer’s accumulation of playbooks and thereby influenced the selection of titles in the 1619 project. An effect of the publisher’s decades-long investment in serials and histories, “Shakespeare” emerged as a discretionary and/or supplementary principle for unifying the serial, historical playbooks in Pavier’s shop.51 For the first ten years of his career, Pavier invested in serial drama. Of the thirteen editions of plays that he published before 1619, ten were parts of series or spinoffs of popular plays.52 One of his first entries in the company’s registers was “The first pte” and “the second & last pte” of “Sr John Oldcastell lord Cobham” in August of 1600.53 Although he refrained from publishing the second part, part one’s title page highlights its ordinal sequence in the series: The first part of the true and honorable historie, of the life of Sir John Old-castle, the good Lord Cobham (1600). A few days after registering Oldcastle Part 1, Pavier entered “The historye of Henrye the vth with the battell of Agencourt” and committed it to print in 1602, the same year that he paid for the transfer of early versions of The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York from Thomas Millington.54 By 1602, then, Pavier owned the rights to print four plays that had been performed in the theaters as parts of series, none of which were attributed to an author. After 1602, Pavier continued to collect the rights to publish serial plays and dramatic spinoffs with character and plot continuities; again, no au-
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thorial ascriptions were printed on title pages. Unlike early versions of the Henry VI plays that presented a chronological retelling of quarrels in the York and Lancaster feud, Oldcastle Part 1 (1600) and Henry V (1602) did not join together neatly into a linear narrative, but they did similarly dramatize King Henry V’s strife before and during the invasion of France.55 Moreover, as spinoffs of the same series, Oldcastle Part 1 and Henry V may have been concurrently staged in competing theaters.56 Henry V was performed in the season of 1598–99 as a sequel to the Chamberlain’s Men’s 1&2 Henry IV (performed 1596–98), and, as its title page divulged, it staged the “battell fought at Agin Court in France. Togither with Auntient Pistoll.”57 Oldcastle Part 1 (performed 1599) was the Lord Pembroke’s Men’s spinoff of the Henry IV series that sought to salvage Sir John Oldcastle’s reputation by portraying the knight as a proto-Protestant martyr loyal to his king, rather than the tavern-loitering drunkard, Falstaff. Although primarily focused on Oldcastle’s piety, the play also dramatizes Henry’s struggles to temper rebellion at home while preparing to conquer his neighbor across the channel. To sell these playbooks, Pavier could capitalize on audiences’ theatrical knowledge of either play or their precursors, 1&2 Henry IV, as well as the historical figures represented across texts. Of course, readers did not have to purchase both plays, but insofar as Henry Oxinden’s book list illustrates how period readers organized their playbooks, Oldcastle Part 1 and Henry V were worthy of compiling together in that order—and preceding a play about events in Henry VI’s reign.58 A cautious and perceptive publisher, Pavier regularly invested in works that were proven sellers, a pattern that finds reinforcement in his repeated investment in plays that had succeeded in the theaters as parts of series.59 With the remarkably well-received The Spanish Tragedy Containing the lamentable end of Don Horatio, and Bel-imperia: with the pittifull death of olde Hieronimo (1602, 1603, 1610), Pavier also published its prequel, The First Part of Jeronimo With the Warres of Portugall, and the life and death of Don Andræa (1605).60 A few years later, he reprinted Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, or The Troubles of Queen Elizabeth (1608, 1610) in tandem with a second edition of its sequel, The Second Part of, If you know not me, you know no bodie. With the building of the Royall Exchange: And the famous Victorie of Queene Elizabeth (1606, 1609), which was published by Pavier’s business associate, Nathaniel Butter.61 Both stationers likely sold the two-play sets from their respective bookshops. Pavier also committed to print a spinoff of The Battle of Alcazar, entitled The Famous Historye of the life and death of Captaine Thomas Stukeley. With his marriage to Alderman Curteis Daughter, and valiant ending of his life at
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the Battaile of Alcazar (1605), as well as A Yorkshire Tragedy. Not so New as Lamentable and true (1608), a special type of part-play, one in a series of four short works that were performed together at the Globe.62 The head-title for the latter guaranteed that readers recalled its status as a part-play in performance: “All’s One, Or, One of the foure Plaies in one, called a York-shire Tragedy: as it was plaid by the Kings Majesties Plaiers.” While publishing tried-and-true serial plays may have served as a profitable end in itself for Pavier, his accumulation of part-plays also supported an expanding specialization in historical drama.63 Some of Pavier’s playbooks were explicitly labeled “histories”; others also or alternatively showcased tag words such as “true” or “life” and/or “death.”64 For instance, Oldcastle Part 1 (1600) was loudly trumpeted as a historical play by using a combination of these terms in its title: “the true and honorable historie, of the life of Sir John Old-castle.” Henry V (1602) reveals a similar, although simpler, approach with “The Chronicle History of Henry the fift.” Pavier’s repeated use of these generic markers on title pages—similar to those used on biographical histories in the period—encouraged readers to relate these playbooks to each other and his other historically oriented texts.65 The stationer’s investments in The Life and death of Jacke Straw, a notable Rebell in England Who was kild in Smithfield by the Lord Maior of London (1604), The Famous Historye of the life and death of Captaine Thomas Stukeley (1605), and If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, or The Troubles of Queen Elizabeth Part 1 (1608, 1610) expose an interest specifically in English histories starring personages well known to London audiences. Still, any of these historical playbooks might have been sold or bundled together or even with some of the publisher’s nondramatic histories, which he was quickly accumulating.66 Cross-textual characters also informed Pavier’s investments in nondramatic works. In 1607 and 1608, the stationer published three titles that capitalized on popular dramatic characters from the professional stage. The first was a ballad related to The Merchant of Venice entitled Calebbe Shillocke, his Prophesie: or, the Jewes Prediction;67 the second, a prose offshoot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream called The historie of Titana and Theseus (1608), attributed to “W.B”;68 and the third, the narrative source of Hamlet, entitled The hystorie of Hamblet (1608),69 appearing for the first time in English and itself influenced by the play. The stationer could market these nondramatic offshoots by exploiting audiences’ theatrical knowledge of corresponding characters from the stage, perhaps even arranging to distribute the early play quartos alongside their offshoots, for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600), The Merchant of Venice (1600), and Hamlet (1603, 1604) had all been previously published.70 Alternatively, Pavier could recommend the
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Figure 1. Title page from A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608). Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 22340.
purchase of both The historie of Titana and Theseus (1608) and The hystorie of Hamblet (1608) together or with the other historical texts in his stock. We now know that Pavier was publishing the offshoots of Shakespeare’s plays, and indeed, Midsummer, Merchant, and Hamlet had all been published with Shakespeare’s name on their title pages before 1608. Nevertheless, if Pavier was aware of Shakespeare’s authorship of the source plays, then apparently he rejected it as a marketing device for the offshoots, instead highlighting the characters’ names that he thought would appeal more to his readers. From 1600 to 1607, Pavier only once included the name of a playwright on a title page.71 When he published A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608) and spuriously advertised that it was “Written by W. Shakespeare,” it was his second, although it was likely the stationer’s investment in historical books that motivated the attribution.72 Critics propose that Pavier deployed the author’s name on the play to exploit Shakespeare’s fame, assuming that the author’s name was more than “sufficient to vent his worke.”73 However, a brief look at the 1608 title page illustrates that Pavier did not put much stock in Shakespeare as a marketing device. As Figure 1 shows, the playwright’s name appears in the smallest typeface, a feature not to be vaunted over other principles and perhaps not even one worth verifying for accuracy. What
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made A Yorkshire Tragedy attractive for Pavier appears to be its topicality and connection to other historical news books in his shop. A part-play performed between 1605 and 1608, A Yorkshire Tragedy Not so new as Lamentable and true told the gruesome tale of Walter Calverly who stabbed his wife and killed his two young sons in April 1605.74 The play was based on a slightly dated news story, which Pavier had found worthy of selling just two years earlier when he entered a “A ballad of [a] Lamentable Murther Donne in Yorkshire by a gent[leman] uponn 2 of his owne Children sore woundinge his Wyfe and Nurse.”75 Thus, by publishing A Yorkshire Tragedy, Pavier was investing in a historical account—one based on “true” events—that he hoped would continue to appeal to his readers, and one that he could peddle alongside the ballad or the other sensational news books in his shop, such as A strange report of sixe most notorious witches, who by their divelish practises murdred above the number of foure hundred small children (1602) or The true and perfect description of three voyages, so strange and woonderfull, that the like hath never been heard of before (1609). Nonetheless, the playwright’s name on A Yorkshire Tragedy was not an empty signifier. In print, “Shakespeare” was recently and repeatedly linked to the same kinds of serial and historical playbooks that Pavier had amassed for years. As Andrew Wise helped establish by 1602, Shakespeare was a playwright who wrote dramatic series that repurposed plots and featured famous historical personages. By 1608, if readers purchased a playbook attributed to Shakespeare, two times out of three, it was a serial or spinoff.76 The “Shakespeare” of 1608 was also affiliated with historical plays. Of the twenty playbook editions published from 1598 to 1608 with Shakespeare’s name on their title pages, thirteen represented a king or prince from times past; an additional two plays (without the names of high-ranking rulers on their title pages) used generic markers suggesting that their content was based on historical or real events.77 Furthermore, in 1608 and 1609, when Pavier was first selling his edition of A Yorkshire Tragedy, readers would also have found the author’s name printed on the title pages of five other historical plays: King Lear (1608), Richard II (1608), 1 Henry IV (1608), Troilus and Cressida (1609), and Pericles (1609).78 Nathaniel Butter’s 1608 edition of King Lear, in fact, touted at the very top of the title page, “M. William Shake-speare: His / True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King Lear”—a title that bears remarkable resemblance in syntax to many of Pavier’s historical playbooks.79 For Pavier, then, “Shakespeare” emerged out of an initial investment in serial and historical plays. The addition of the author’s name to the byline on A Yorkshire Tragedy implies that “Shakespeare” was still developing as a marketing device, not one that would eclipse a play’s serial, historical features but one that would reinforce them.
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Figure 2. Title page from The Whole Contention [1619]. Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 26101 copy 3.
3 From 1609 to 1618, Pavier’s interests largely shifted away from drama and other ephemera to religious works such as prayer books and sermons.80 No Shakespeare plays and no new dramatic titles were published.81 Thus, Pavier’s decision in 1619 to issue nine plays—The Whole Contention, Henry V, Oldcastle Part 1, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, Pericles, A Yorkshire Tragedy, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream—and to add or reprint Shakespeare’s name on the title pages of eight of the quartos might suggest that the stationer was adopting a new strategy for selling drama.82 And yet, by setting forth nine playbooks in one year—all previously published either by him or other stationers—Pavier was still sticking to his old approaches by (1) investing in titles and “kinds” of texts that had sold in the past and (2) using seriality and historicity as principles of collection to stimulate the sale of these titles in sets.83 Indeed, when viewed within the scope of Pavier’s past investments in serials and histories, the 1619 quartos cannot simply be understood as an early “Shakespeare collection.”
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But once authorship is added to existing principles, this scene or moment of collecting lays the ground for the next one in the long unfolding process. Serial plays formed the core of Pavier’s investment in 1619. Of the ten plays that he published that year, six had been performed as serials or spinoffs in the professional theaters.84 In fact, Pavier initiated the 1619 project by unifying two serialized texts, The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, under a new title, The Whole Contention (1619). These two plays had been transmitted together since Millington first issued them in matching quartos in 1600. Now sold in a single edition, The Whole Contention was an attractive collection, and readers could have purchased just this historical series if they so wished, leaving the other quartos behind. When glancing at the title page of The Whole Contention (Figure 2), readers might not have even noticed the author’s name, which appeared in the smallest font on the page and was buried at the end of the rambling plot description. If an early impulse in the project was to unify related part-plays, then other serial associations likely emerged as principles of collection for Pavier, fellow booksellers, and readers. In addition to two plays that he had previously published, Henry V (1619) and Oldcastle Part 1 (1619), Pavier added another spinoff of the Henry IV series performed around the same time in 1599 or 1600, The Merry Wives of Windsor (1619).85 The full title of Merry Wives further validated its affiliation with these serial plays: A Most pleasaunt and excellent conceited Comedie, of Syr John Falstaffe, and the merrie Wives of Windsor. Entermixed with sundrie variable and pleasing humors, of Syr Hugh the Welch Knight, Justice Shallow, and his wise Cousin M. Slender. With the swaggering vaine of Auncient Pistoll, and Corporall Nym. As with Pavier’s nondramatic spinoffs, character is the important link here. By purchasing these three quartos, a reader could reminisce about the Falstaff/ Oldcastle controversy or relive the theatrical moments when Henry V, Falstaff, Pistol, and Nym ruled the London stage. That five of the ten plays were explicitly advertised as “histories” on their title pages and the remaining five were implicitly or explicitly linked to historical narratives suggests that dramatic “kind” dominated both the selection and marketing of the Pavier quartos.86 Like their first editions, Pavier’s Henry V (1619) and Oldcastle Part 1 (1619) were again advertised as a “Chronicle History” and “true & honorable history,” respectively. Pavier also negotiated with other stationers for permissions to print The Merchant of Venice, an “Excellent Historie”; King Lear, a “True Chronicle History”; and “the true Relation of the whole History” of Pericles. The remaining five plays published in 1619 brought to life events and figures from the re-
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cent and distant past and featured cross-textual characters from historical narratives. The two parts of The Whole Contention were not advertised as “histories” on their title pages, but their subject matter was derived from English chronicles. The Merry Wives of Windsor was, like its 1602 quarto, clearly labeled a “pleasant and excellent conceited Comedy,” but the list of characters on the title page allied the work with other historical plays in the set, especially Henry V, which also mentions “Pistol” on its title page. The 1619 edition of A Yorkshire Tragedy was not advertised as a history, but the play was based on a “true” account. Even A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of the most fantastical of Shakespeare’s plays and of those published by Pavier in the 1619 quartos, dramatized the relationships between figures from classical histories, Theseus and Hippolyta as well as Pyramus and Thisbe.87 Pavier’s title for his prose offshoot of the play, The Hystorie of Theseus and Titana (1608), foregrounds his interest in the comedy’s historical aspect. With nine quartos to sell, it was in a bookseller’s interests not to limit the principles of collection but to showcase multiple links between plays to encourage the purchase of playbooks in multi-book sets by readers with different interests. Authorship appears to be one of these optional principles, but it was simultaneously an organizational framework that could reinforce connections between serial and historical drama. The “Shakespeare” available to Pavier in 1619 was still a serial, historical “Shakespeare.” Between 1609 and 1618, all playbooks attributed to the playwright on their title pages were serials and/or histories.88 That the author’s name continued to function as a signifier for this kind of play is also evidenced in a new ascription to “W. Sh.” on the second edition of The First and second Part of the troublesome Raigne of John King of England (1611), a five-act drama based on the fall of an English king and divided into two parts.89 As it was for the publisher of The Troublesome Reign (1611), Shakespeare’s authorship for Pavier could further unify sets, such as The Whole Contention; Henry V and Oldcastle 1; or promote the pairing of two historical books like Pericles and King Lear. While Shakespeare’s authorship could be put into play as a principle on its own, we should not assume that Pavier or his readers envisioned it as the exclusive framework for producing, marketing, or buying these plays, many of which had sold for Pavier in the past as serial histories without any authorial attribution. In fact, “Shakespeare” was completely left off the title page of Henry V in 1602 and 1619, and the author’s name appeared in the smallest typeface on the title pages of The Whole Contention (Figure 2) and Oldcastle Part 1 (Figure 3).90 For all of these plays, it was their historical plots and characters that were advertised most prominently on title pages.
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Figure 3. Title page from Sir John Oldcastle (1600 [i.e. 1619]). Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 18796 copy 4, Bd.w. STC 26101 copy 3.
Because the quartos were formatted as independent playbooks, any of the 1619 playbooks could be purchased individually or alongside any of the other serials, spinoffs, and histories already in Pavier’s bookshop. For instance, it seems Pavier had alternative plans for selling The excellent Historie of the Merchant of Venice. With the extreme cruelty of Shylocke the Jew towards the saide Merchant, in cutting a just pound of his flesh. And the obtaining of Portia, by the choyse of three Caskets (1619) next to a ballad that shared characters and plot details. In 1620, he committed to print the ballad entitled, A new song, shewing the crueltie of Gernatus a Jew, who lending to a marchant a hundred crownes, would have a pound of his flesh, because he could not pay him at the day appointed (1620).91 Like Pavier’s previous offshoots, this ballad made no mention of an originating source or author, but it adapted the plot and title of Shakespeare’s play, which the publisher would have had available in his bookstall at the time.92 As Pavier’s marketing processes reveal, the principles consistently worthy of investment were those that were more intrinsic to the text, such as plot and character, features that were expanded and exploited in serial historical plays.
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Figure 4. Manuscript Table of Contents on verso of front flyleaf. Folger Shakespeare Library. STC 26101 copy 2.
For those readers who did purchase and bind the nine quartos, a variety of principles guided their compilations. In a volume at the Folger Shakespeare Library, a manuscript table of contents on a flyleaf reveals that a reader bound together ten quartos, nine of which were Pavier’s 1619 editions; the first work in the collection, however, was not a Shakespeare play or one published by Pavier, but Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (1617) (Figure 4).93 As Jeffrey Todd Knight has proposed, “Such a volume suggests how early owners, enabled by the built-in-flexibility of printed products like the Pavier quartos, could make books—and frameworks for reading—both inside and outside prescribed schemes of organization.”94 If Shakespeare’s authorship was a prescribed framework for the 1619 quartos, then including Heywood’s play was a rejection of the bookseller’s principle. But, it is more likely that Shakespeare’s authorship was simply one of many possible organizational frameworks offered to readers purchasing the quartos. A Woman Killed with Kindness, although not a serial history, was like the other 1619 quartos because it was an older play, performed in 1603. If a reader was interested in amassing printed drama performed decades ago
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in London’s theaters, this compilation served this purpose well. Another more practical reason for this assemblage also exists. A Woman Killed with Kindness had been printed by William Jaggard in 1607 and was reprinted by Isaac Jaggard, his son, in 1617.95 Because the 1619 quartos were produced in the Jaggards’ printing house, this Sammelbänd may have been formed in their shop, either the product of the stationers marketing bundles of books from their press or perhaps the result of displaying or storing together similar kinds of recently printed books. Whatever principles and material conditions motivated the collection of these titles, the plays that were made together appeared to stay together, reflecting not an author as the unifying glue but a stationer’s interest in selling more than a few playbooks at a time. Within readers’ sammelbände containing the Pavier quartos, seriality and historicity were also readily employed as organizational principles. In the Folger volume discussed above, a reader positioned Henry V immediately before The Whole Contention, establishing a serial pairing based on a chronology of historical event, just as in the Harington and Oxinden collections.96 In this same volume, the reader arranged The Merry Wives of Windsor before Sir John Oldcastle Part 1, coupling two spinoffs of the Henry IV series. Another volume still in seventeenth-century calfskin at the Mary Couts Burnett Library, holding all nine Pavier quartos, reveals that a reader joined together Henry V and Oldcastle Part 1, two serial plays with cross-textual characters, preceded by The Whole Contention, A Yorkshire Tragedy, and Pericles and followed by King Lear, Midsummer, Merry Wives, and Merchant.97 In this sammelbänd, the first six plays are historical texts, five of which portrayed past kings or princes. If this reader compiled these plays because of their shared authorship, as most scholars assume, then his or her organization exposes how deeply ingrained were the principles of seriality and historicity in conceptualizing the author’s dramatic works. Indeed, it is through Pavier’s collection of serial and historical plays that this “Shakespeare” was in a position to emerge for both booksellers and readers in 1619 and thereafter.
4 In 1623, the makers of the First Folio, Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, appropriated and reformulated the principles of seriality and historicity to promote a new “Shakespeare,” one worthy of his own collected edition.98 However, because current critical narratives overwhelmingly privilege the novelty of the folio—celebrating its “new” classification, arrangement, and titling of plays—the principles of collec-
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tion used by previous agents are frequently overlooked.99 My aim in this conclusion is to destabilize these narratives by briefly demonstrating how the folio’s organization and presentation of the author’s plays are indebted to earlier agents and their organizational frameworks, specifically in the folio’s categorization of the English history plays. Because serial historical plays were so central to constructions of “Shakespeare” in print before 1623, it seems not a coincidence that the folio’s makers positioned the “Histories” at the center of the volume and used seriality to order them. When agents divided the thirty-six plays into three genres, the comedies (appearing first) and the tragedies (appearing last) were not assembled in any clear order, but the histories were precisely arranged in a chronology of monarchs, starting with King John, followed by Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV, Henry the Fift, the three parts of Henry the Sixt, Richard the Third, and ending with Henry the Eight. Only the histories in the 1623 volume contained plays labeled as “parts,” and, as it was for Millington, Wise, and Pavier, cohering these parts in an ordinal sequence for readers was an appealing organizational strategy. Although bringing all ten plays and their ordinal parts together into one material volume was the innovation of the First Folio, agents like Millington, Wise, and Pavier had groomed English readers for decades to consume historical plays in serial arrangements. Indeed, readers may have even expected as much from a collection of Shakespeare plays, for every previously printed history play in the folio was a serialized text and nearly every one was explicitly attributed to the author before 1623. The “Histories” begin with “The Life and Death of King John,” which was a revised and expanded version of The First and second Part of the troublesome Raigne of John King of England. With the discoverie of King Richard Cordelions Base sonne (vulgarly named, The Bastard Fawconbridge:) Also, the death of King John at Swinstead Abbey, published in 1591, 1611, and 1622.100 The second quarto names “W. Sh.” on its title page while the third quarto expands the attribution to “W. Shakespeare.”101 The second, third, and fourth histories in the Folio—“The Life & death of Richard the second,” “The First parte of King Henry the fourth,” and “The Second part of K. Henry the fourth”—were all previously Wise quartos ascribed on their title pages to Shakespeare. Next were the serial plays that had been issued by Millington and then Pavier, although a number of revisions and expansions had been made to the texts. For example, after “The Life of King Henry the Fift” (the only play not attributed to Shakespeare on previous quartos), a new play was added to the series, “The First part of King Henry the Sixt,” which then transformed revised versions of Pavier’s Whole Contention (ascribed to Shakespeare) into “The Second
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part of King Hen. the Sixt” and “The Third part of King Henry the Sixt” when revised and reprinted in the folio. “The Life and Death of Richard the Third,” as it had for Wise, completed a cycle of history plays, although one more text, “The Life of King Henry the Eight,” previously unpublished, would conclude the Histories in the folio. The titles of the folio’s Histories were also heavily revised from their previous manifestations in quarto to establish uniformity among the plays in the genre, as all of the History plays were assigned the name of an English monarch featured in the play. While previous publishers created connections among serial plays by naming popular characters and familiar historical plots, the makers of the folio made efforts to condense titles and erase plot details and supporting characters to create more coherent generic units. For example, Wise’s quarto title for The History of Henrie the Fourth; with the battell at Shrewsburie, betweene the King and Lord Henry Percy, surnamed Henrie Hotspur of the North. With the humorous conceits of Sir John Falstalffe was changed to “The First parte of King Henry the fourth” on the folio’s catalogue.102 The aim in the folio was to fix the play within its assigned genre and series, but Wise’s expanded title functioned more effectively to advertise the play’s noteworthy characters and narratives, linking it with other Henry or Falstaff plays. In the folio, 1 Henry IV was no longer a single quarto requiring multiple points of intrigue to entice readers. Of course, the cluster of ten plays titled as “Histories” in the collected edition newly defined the dramatic genre. The folio’s “Histories” selectively featured England’s Christian kings who reigned after the Conquest, thereby excepting non-Christian rulers of Britain such as King Lear and Cymbeline and the Scottish King Macbeth. As scholars have proposed, the folio was the first time that Shakespeare’s “Histories” had been so precisely demarcated as such, and the designation, it has been argued, was more out of convenience than careful contemplation of what aesthetic or thematic features made up the “English History Play.”103 Scholars propose, for instance, that by highlighting the reigning monarch in each play’s title and removing other characters or plot details in the plays, agents not only newly constructed the illusion of coherence and uniformity among the Histories, but also newly located the plays in a providential scheme of English history beginning with King John and ending with Henry VIII.104 While critics are correct to attribute the unity and sequencing of the ten Histories to editorial revisions and excisions made by agents in and around 1623, it was not the first time that these plays were presented as biographical histories dramatizing the life and/or death of a singular monarch—and, as such, plays that could be joined with other similarly labeled
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works. Selling plays in sets or series that foregrounded historical figures proved to be a marketing strategy for Wise and Pavier, especially when the narratives featured English kings who spanned across texts. Wise’s serials precisely showcased English dynastic rulers—Richard II, Richard III, and Henry IV—who were advertised as one highlight of each play on title pages. Although Pavier’s notions of what constituted a “history” were more diffuse than those manifest in the folio, the biographical emphasis on the singular “lives” and/or “deaths” of English figures advertised in the folio’s Histories was a titling practice employed by Pavier throughout his career. As discussed above, Pavier frequently advertised historical works, including Shakespeare’s plays, as “life” and/or “death” narratives. These words and phrases signaled to his readers that they were, in fact, reading a historical play and could be used to persuade readers to buy similar kinds of books from the publisher. A glance at the folio’s catalogue shows that half of the History plays appropriated this terminology, including “The Life and Death of King John,” “The Life & death of Richard the second,” “The Life of King Henry the fift,” “The Life & death of Richard the Third,” and “The Life of King Henry the Eight.”105 For the publishers who financed the folio project, adopting previous agents’ tried-and-true principles of collection was a means for securing their current investment. Like Millington, Wise, and Pavier, the folio’s makers sought to construct relationships among dramatic texts to persuade readers to accept these works as an attractive unit, worthy of buying together and reading together. Seriality in the folio likewise established the unity of the History plays and created a structure through which the ten works could be ordered by content. While Millington, Wise, and Pavier could always fall back on selling playbooks in individual editions if readers rejected the multiple principles of collection that they prescribed, the folio’s success depended on customers’ acceptance of the principles unifying each genre as well as the overriding principle of collection: Shakespeare’s authorship. Although marketed in the folio as an author “not of an age but for all time,” the “Shakespeare” of 1623, who became central to this collection for the first time, emerged gradually out of the processes of collecting, driven by several principles and multiple agents. All of these accruing principles continued to influence how readers approached the author’s works thereafter. Agents of the Second (1632), Third (1664), and Fourth (1685) folios adopted the generic categories from the First Folio and continued to order the Histories in a chronology of monarchs, beginning with King John and ending with Henry VIII. Even today, current editions of Shakespeare’s “Complete Works” reinstate the folio’s generic divisions. Pearson-
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Longman’s The Complete Works of Shakespeare edited by David Bevington retains the same three generic categories as the First Folio—Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies—and the plays are grouped in that order, with the Romances following behind.106 The Norton Shakespeare editions currently offer readers the option of buying the complete works in one volume, or just the “Comedies,” “Histories,” “Tragedies,” or “Romances and Poems” in separate volumes.107 Readers in search of just one genre of plays need not purchase the whole. However, readers will also note that within the Histories in both the Bevington and Norton editions, the plays are arranged not in a chronology of content but by chronology of Shakespeare’s composition, which differs by edition. In Bevington’s volume, readers will find the Histories begin not with The Life and Death of King John, but with The First Part of King Henry the Sixth. In the Norton volume of “Histories,” the first play is “The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster (2 Henry VI),” a title hearkening back to Millington’s first edition of the play in 1594. For current publishing agents, it is the history of Shakespeare’s development as a dramatist, uncertain in chronology as it is, that takes precedence in ordering his plays, but only after they are first organized by genre. Tracing genealogies of collection of Shakespeare’s works proves both the durability of some organization frameworks such as genre and the ease with which others, such as seriality, can be reformulated depending on the aims of the agents making the books. In fact, I suspect that it is precisely these agents’ openness to appropriations and reformulations of past principles that has kept these plays on the bookshelves of a great variety of readers to the present day.
University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth
NOTES I wish to thank Carol Neely, Zachary Lesser, Sara Luttfring, and the “Shakespeare for Sale” seminarians for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. 1
For more on dating the Henry VI plays (The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of Yorke), see Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, and William Montgomery, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford U. Press, 1987), 111–12. The plays are now known as early versions of William Shakespeare’s 2&3 Henry VI.
2
For an overview of critical debates on the serial composition and performance of the Henry VI series, see Graham Holderness, Shakespeare: The Histories (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000); Thomas A. Pendleton, “Introduction,” Henry VI: Critical Essays, ed.
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TARA L. LYONS Thomas A. Pendleton (New York: Routledge, 2001), 1–26; Mary Thomas Crane, “The Shakespearean Tetralogy,” Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1985): 282–99; and Nicholas Grene, Shakespeare’s Serial History Plays (Cambridge U. Press, 2002), 19, 23. For more on the plays’ serial performance, also see Roslyn Lander Knutson, Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, 1594–1613 (Fayetteville: U. of Arkansas Press, 1991), 73. 3
The play was printed by Thomas Creede.
4
The play was printed by Peter Short.
5
Crane, “Shakespearean Tetralogy,” 290. Steven Urkowitz, “Texts with Two Faces: Noting Theatrical Revisions in Henry VI, Parts 2 and 3,” Henry VI: Critical Essays, ed. Thomas A. Pendleton (New York: Routledge, 2001), 27–38, succinctly describes the complex relationship between variant copies of the Henry VI plays and the theories about their evolution in performance and print.
6
The playbooks were likely marketed and sold together as a set, but readers did not have to purchase them together, for each was printed as an independent edition with its own title page and signatures. The First part of the Contention (1600) was printed by Valentine Simmes for Thomas Millington, and The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke (1600) was printed by William White for Thomas Millington.
7
The play was not registered to Millington when he and Busby published it, but their printer Thomas Creede had entered in 1594 an earlier version of the work, The Famous Victories of Henry the fifth: Containing the Honourable Battell of Agin-court. For more on the first quarto’s publication, see Andrew Gurr, ed., The First Quarto of King Henry V, (Cambridge U. Press, 2000), 6–7.
8
My methods of analyzing stationers as investors and speculators in the book trade are adapted from Zachary Lesser’s Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication (Cambridge U. Press, 2006).
9
Edward Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London 1554–1640, 5 vols. (1875; repr. New York: Peter Smith, 1950), 3:169.
10 Arber, Transcript, 3:204. 11 The play’s title page also announced that it was “Written by William Shakespeare, Gent.” (1619). The quarto was printed by William Jaggard. 12 The collection was the First Folio, Mr. William Shakespeares comedies, histories, & tragedies. Published according to the true originall copies (London: William Jaggard, Edward Blount, John Smithwicke, and William Aspley, 1623). 13 Alexandra Gillespie, “Poets, Printers, and Early English Sammelbände,” Huntington Library Quarterly 67 (2004): 206, discusses the marketing techniques of stationers who formatted related texts in manuscript and print with similar title pages and material features to encourage readers to buy “not just one book, but a whole series of them.” See also Gillespie’s “Caxton’s Chaucer and Lydgate Quartos: Miscellanies from Manuscript to Print,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 12 (2000): 1–25. Paulina Kewes, “‘Give Me the Sociable Pocket-books . . . ’: Humphrey Moseley’s Serial Publication of Octavo Play Collections,” Publishing History 38 (1995): 5–21, notes a similar strategy
“SHAKESPEARE” IN COLLECTION used by publisher and bookseller Mosely, who designed a series of small octavo editions of single-author play collections. 14 R. W. Wiles, Serial Publication in England before 1750 (Cambridge U. Press, 1957), 15. 15 Grene, Shakespeare’s Serial History, 8–9. Knutson, Repertory, 52, similarly claims that the impetus for a serial play was “popular demand.” 16 My argument here is not that every serial play was a blockbuster in the theaters but that companies were attuned to customers’ demands. If a company could justify producing a sequel or spinoff, the source play likely comprised features that audiences were thought to respond well to. As for the spinoffs, they recycled plots and characters proven to sell in the past. Although some sequels certainly flopped in the theaters, they retained marketable elements in print because of their association with previously successful plays. 17 A number of other stationers in the period were investing in part-plays from the professional theaters, sometimes publishing pairs together, other times printing parts in individual editions: Richard Jones published Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine 1&2 (1590, 1593, 1597); Sampson Clarke published The Troublesome Reign of King John 1&2 (1591); Thomas Millington published early versions of 2&3 Henry VI (1600); John Oxonbridge and then Humphrey Lownes published Edward IV 1&2 (1599, 1600); William Leake published Robin Hood 1&2 (1601); and Thomas Fisher published Antonio and Mellida 1&2 (1602); Mathew Lownes jointly published part 1 with Fisher. For more on stationers who encouraged compilation through the marketing of literary texts, see Stephen K. Galbraith, “Spenser’s First Folio: The Build-It-Yourself Edition,” Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual 21 (2006): 21–50. Also, see Jeffrey Todd Knight’s thorough research on readers’ sammelbände in the period in “Fast Bind, Fast Find: The History of the Book and the Modern Collection,” Criticism 51 (2009): 70–104; and “Making Shakespeare’s Books: Assembly and Intertextuality in the Archives,” Shakespeare Quarterly 60 (2009): 304–40. 18 “Seriality” refers to the relationship between two or more dramatic texts (1) that have been sequentially numbered, (2) that incrementally provide a continuous or sequenced narrative, and/or (3) that “spin-off ” the plot or characters from another text. See Knutson, Repertory, 51, on the “different narrative relationships” among serials and spinoffs in the early modern theater. “Historicity” refers to the quality of a text that is historical in the sense that it attends to events or figures in the actual or recorded past, including native and foreign stories, classical and mythological tales, as well as news books and biographical accounts. For the purposes of this essay, I do not subscribe to the Shakespeare folio’s classification of the “history play,” which limits the scope to plays that feature Christian English kings after the Conquest. As Ivo Kamps, “The Writing of History in Shakespeare’s England,” A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, vol. 2, The Histories, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 8, reminds us: “History could mean a lot of different things in the period: poems, plays, memorials, biographies, narratives of current events, political narratives, annals, chronicles, surveys, antiquarian accounts—all could bear the name of ‘history’ in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.” 19 The workes of Benjamin Jonson (London: William Stansby, 1616). In current accounts of the collection, the Jonson and Shakespeare folios exist as both origins and endpoints, marking the commencement of dramatic authorship and the end of a time when plays were just plays. Jonson’s folio is said to have “inaugurated the era of the printed drama collection” and is often cited incorrectly as the first to present vernacular drama in collection, English drama in folio, and an English dramatist’s plays as “Works.” For an example, see Douglas Brooks in From Playhouse to Printing House (Cambridge U. Press, 2000), 13. Also, Jonson’s collection is regularly cited as the “only” or the “essential” precedent for the
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TARA L. LYONS Shakespeare First Folio; see Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 42. Stephen Orgel, “The Authentic Shakespeare,” Shakespeare: The Critical Complex, ed. Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen (New York: Garland, 1999), 96, similarly considers Jonson’s 1616 Workes as the “essential model for the authorized collection of Shakespeare’s plays in 1623.” As for the Shakespeare folio, Peter W. M. Blayney, The First Folio of Shakespeare (Washington: Folger Library, 1991), 1, confirms that it was “the first folio book ever published in England that was devoted exclusively to plays.” If we discount Fulgens and Lucrece 1&2 and Nature 1&2, Blayney is correct. Jeffrey Knapp, “What Is a Co-Author?” Representations 89 (2005): 20, correctly affirms that before 1623, “other collections had been published consisting solely of plays, but not of commercial plays and not in folio.” Both Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge U. Press, 2003), 45, and Benedict Scott Robinson, “Thomas Heywood and the Cultural Politics of Play Collections,” SEL 42 (2002): 370, mention a number of drama collections published before Jonson’s as proof that dramatic texts were being published in the format; however, both scholars situate these early collections in the realm of noncommercial drama, even though, as printed texts, they were produced as commodities for profit in the book format imagined to bring a stationer the most profit. 20 See, e.g., Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge U. Press, 2003), 25; William Kuskin, “Recursive Origins: Print History and Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI,” Shakespeare and the Middle Ages, ed. Curtis Perry and John Watkins (Oxford U. Press, 2009), 128–29; “The First Part of the Contention,” The Oxford Shakespeare, ed. John Jowett, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor, and Stanley Wells (Oxford U. Press, 2005), 55; and Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2005), 93–94. 21 Theoretical shifts in textual studies in the 1980s and early 1990s argued was it was not “the Author” that existed before the collection, but the collection that created “the Author.” See Richard Newton, “Jonson and the (Re)Invention of the Book,” Classic and Cavalier: Essays on Jonson and the Sons of Ben, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (U. of Pittsburgh Press, 1982), 31–58; and Richard Helgerson, Self-crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (U. of California Press, 1983). This new approach to the relationship between printed collections and dramatists ultimately derived from the poststructuralist theories of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, whose critical interrogations of authorship exposed the historically constructed and functional nature of the authorial persona. As later scholars have shown, Shakespeare’s dramatic authorship was a product of market forces in the London book trade and constructed by agents whose livelihoods depended on the sale of literature as a print commodity. See David Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge U. Press, 2001), 78; and Douglas Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge U. Press, 2000). 22 For a more developed discussion of the variety of collected forms in which printed drama appears from 1512 to 1623, see Tara L. Lyons, “English Printed Drama in Collection Before Jonson and Shakespeare” (PhD diss., U. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2011). Because individual dramatic texts were typically sold in the period unbound, simply “stab-stitched” with a single thread running through two or three holes punched through the text block, stationers and readers could easily bring any set of texts together to create their own collections. “Sammelbänd,” as John Carter and Nicholas Barker specify, “is the German word for books in which two or more bibliographically distinct works are bound together within the same covers.” See ABC for Book Collectors, 8th ed. (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 2006), 197. For a brief discussion of using “Sammelbände” to refer to English composite volumes or “tract volumes,” see Paul Needham, The Printer and the Pardoner, An Unrecorded Indulgence Printed by William Caxton for the Hospital of St. Mary Rounceval, Charing Cross (Washington: Library of Congress, 1986).
“SHAKESPEARE” IN COLLECTION 23 Lukas Erne asserts that “the Lord Chamberlain’s Men had a coherent strategy to try to get their playwright’s plays into print” in Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge U. Press, 2003), 80. However tenable, his narrative treats “Shakespeare” as the primary impetus for the collection of the quartos, as he would be in 1623 when his plays were amassed for the Folio. For more on Wise’s connection to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, see Sonia Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge U. Press, 2007), 95–96; and Adam G. Hooks, “Wise Ventures: Shakespeare and Thomas Playfere at the Sign of the Angel,” Shakespeare’s Stationers: Studies in Cultural Bibliography (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 47–62. 24 W. W. Greg, A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration, 2nd ed., 4 vols. (London: Bibliographical Society, 1970), 3:1107; Gerald D. Johnson, “Thomas Pavier, Publisher, 1600–1625,” Library 14 (1992): 37; Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor, 106–7; Murphy, Shakespeare in Print, 42. 25 Other than his editions of Richard II, Richard III, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Much Ado About Nothing, Wise published only eight other titles during his career: Christs teares over Jerusalem (1594); A most excellent and heavenly sermon (1594, 1595, 1596); The pathway to perfection (1596, 1597); The meane in mourning (1597); A booke of the seven planets (1598); The battaile fought betweene Count Maurice of Nassaw, and Albertus arch-duke of Austria (1600); Album, seu Nigrum amicorum (1600); and Observations in the art of English poesie (1602). 26 The play was jointly printed by Valentine Simmes and Peter Short. 27 Wells, William Shakespeare, 111–12, 115. 28 For more on the company and patrons for whom Richard III was composed, see Jowett, Richard III, 4–7. Shakespeare’s Richard III was likely a revised version of the Queen’s Men’s The True Tragedie of Richard the third (1594). This playbook was printed by Thomas Creede and sold by William Barley. 29 The full title is The Tragedie of King Richard the second. As it hath beene publikely acted by the right Honourable the Lorde Chamberlaine his Servants (1597, 1598). 30 Wells et al., William Shakespeare, 121, 117, 120. 31 While the title page for STC 22279a (1598) is missing, STC 22280 (1598) was printed by Peter Short and STC 22281 (1599) was printed by Simon Stafford. 32 The title page also announced that the play was “Written by William Shakespeare. As it hath been sundrie times publikely acted by the right honourable, the Lord Chamberlaine his servants” (1600). It was printed by Valentine Simmes. 33 For the years of performance, see Wells et al., William Shakespeare, 121, 117, 120. 34 There is still much debate on whether the serial plays were performed on consecutive nights or whether contemporary audiences would have viewed them in a sequence. These studies, however, focus primarily on the composition and performance of the plays without addressing how the publication and processes of gathering them in print would have introduced readers to part-plays in collected sets. For more on the debate, see G. K.
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TARA L. LYONS Hunter, “Henry IV and the Elizabethan Two-Part Play,” RES 19 (1954): 236–48; Crane, “Shakespearean Tetralogy,” 282–99; and P. Dean, “Forms of Time: Some Elizabethan Two-Part History Plays,” Journal of the Society for Renaissance Studies 4 (1990): 410–30. 35 Harington might have been referring to the 1598 (Wise) or 1608 (Law) edition of 1 Henry IV, and the 1597 (Wise) or 1605 (Law) editions of Richard III. Harington’s edition of 2 Henry IV had to be the Wise edition from 1600. See Greg, English Printed Drama, 3:1311. 36 Greg, English Printed Drama, 3:1313, 1315. 37 Giles E. Dawson, “An Early List of Elizabethan Plays,” The Library 15 (March 1935): 446. Oxinden’s books may have been gathered in containers rather than volumes. 38 Roger Chartier and Peter Stallybrass, “Reading and Authorship: The Circulation of Shakespeare 1590–1619,” A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text, ed. Andrew Murphy (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 42. 39 Harington’s list also includes “Queen Elis.” and “Queen Elis. Hobs tawnycoat” in tome 4; “Tamberlane” [part 1] and “Tamberlane” [part 2] in tome 5; “Edward 4” [part 1] and “Edward 4” [part 2] in tome 5; and “Biron j.” and “Biroun 2.” in tome 8. A similar pairing of part-plays in Oxinden’s list is also apparent with “The first part of K. Ed 4” and “The second part” in volume 2; “Byrons Conspiracy 1594 2 playes” in volume 4; and “The Silver Age” and “The Brazen Age” in volume 6. See Greg, English Printed Drama, 3:1313, 1315. 40 Printing the author’s name on professional plays (especially on previously published ones) was not a common practice for London stationers in the 1590s, although the trend was beginning to take hold. More often, publishers highlighted the name of the theater company, as Wise did by naming the Lord Chamberlain’s Men on all quartos except for 1 Henry IV. See James P. Saeger and Christopher J. Fasller, “The London Professional Theater, 1576–1642: A Catalogue and Analysis of the Extant Printed Plays,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 34 (1995): 68–69; Zachary Lesser and Alan B. Farmer, “Vile Arts: The Marketing of English Printed Drama, 1512–1660,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 39 (2000): 77–165. 41 The 1596 pair sold out within the year, and Wise issued both sermons together in the following year (1597). 42 Richard Bancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, not only collected the pair but also arranged them in a Sammelbänd in chronological order, preserving them alongside other period sermons by William Gravet and John Deacon. The volume is encased in a gold-tooled calfskin binding, now housed at the Lambeth Palace Library. I want to thank Hugh Cahill for his assistance with this volume, (ZZ)1587.2.01–04. 43 Robert F. Fleissner proposes that Much Ado About Nothing may actually be the subtitle to the lost play, Love’s Labour’s Won, recorded by Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia (1598). If this is the case, then Much Ado was also a serial play and a sequel to Love’s Labour’s Lost. See Fleissner, “Love’s Labour’s Won and the Occasion of Much Ado,” Shakespeare Survey 27 (1974): 105–10. Wise entered Much Ado on August 23, 1600, just a few weeks after the Stationers’ Register’s record on 4 August 1600, when four Chamberlain’s Men plays were staged: Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Henry V, and Every Man in His Humor. See Arber, Transcript, 3:37.
“SHAKESPEARE” IN COLLECTION 44 See John Jowett, Shakespeare and Text (Oxford U. Press, 2007), 11. It was in reference to an early version of The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York that Shakespeare earned his first mention as a dramatist in print in Robert Greene’s Groats-worth of Witte (1592). Grene, Serial History Plays, 15–16, maintains that Greene’s complaint about the “upstart Crow” may have derived from “the unprecedented spectacle of the actor/playwright having three plays produced as a series in the theatre to phenomenal success.” 45 Grene, Serial History Plays, 21. 46 John Jowett, Shakespeare and Text, 11. 47 As Adam G. Hooks “Book Trade,” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Oxford U. Press, 2011), 135, 137, explains, there was no singular “Shakespeare” circulating in print in the period, but multiple versions of the author. For example, Wise’s publications coupled with Millington’s promoted a version of the author who was “increasingly known for plays based on the chronicles of English history, and featuring compelling, captivating central characters.” 48 The full titles for each of the Pavier quartos follow: The Whole contention betweene the two famous houses, Lancaster and Yorke. With the Tragicall ends of the good Duke Humfrey, Richard Duke of Yorke, and King Henrie the sixt. Divided into two Parts: And newly corrected and enlarged. Written by William Shakespeare, Gent. ([1619]); The Late, And much admired Play, Called, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. With the true Relation of the whole History, adventures, and fortunes of the saide Prince. Written by W. Shakespeare ([1619]); A Yorkshire Tragedie. Not so New, as Lamentable and True. Written by W. Shakespeare (1619); The Excellent Historie of the Merchant of Venice. With the extreme cruelty of Shylocke the Jew towards the saide Merchant, in cutting a just pound of his flesh. And the obtaining of Portia, by the choyse of three Caskets. Written by W. Shakespeare ([1619]); A Most pleasant and excellent conceited Comedy, of Sir John Falstaffe, and the merry Wives of Windsor. With the swaggering vaine of Ancient Pistoll, and Corporall Nym (1619); A midsommer nights dreame. Written by William Shakespeare ([1619]); M. William Shakespeare, his true chronicle history of the life and death of King Lear, and his three Daughters. With the unfortunate life of Edgar, sonne and heire to the Earle of Glocester, and his sullen and assumed humour of Tom of Bedlam ([1619]); The chronicle history of Henry the fift, with his battell fought at Agin Court in France. Together with ancient Pistoll.As it hath bene sundry times playd by the Right Honourable the Lord Chamberlaine his Servants ([1619]); and The first part of the true & honorable history, of the life of Sir John Old-castle, the good Lord Cobham. Written by William Shakespeare. As it hath bene lately acted by the Right honorable the Earle of Notingham Lord High Admirall of England, his Servants ([1619]). 49 For some of the preliminary work done on the Pavier quartos and the fake title page dates, see W. W. Greg, “On Certain False Dates in Shakespearian Quartos,” The Library 9 (1908): 113–31; A. W. Pollard, Shakespeare Folios and Quartos: A Study in the Bibliography of Shakespeare’s Plays, 1594–1685 (New York: Cooper Square, 1970), 81–107; and William S. Kable, The Pavier Quartos and the First Folio of Shakespeare (Dubuque, IA: W. C. Brown, 1970). For more recent work, see Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, 255–58; and Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor, 106–35. All of these sources infer that Shakespeare’s authorship was the primary impetus for the Pavier quartos project. 50 The most widely promoted theory suggests that Pavier and Jaggard intended to publish the ten Shakespeare plays in a collected edition, which would explain why The Whole Contention and Pericles were first issued with continuous signatures and published under a joint title. Scholars assert, however, that Pavier and Jaggard were forced to abandon the project when the King’s Men issued a court injunction restricting the further publication of their plays without their permission. It is assumed that the injunction was designed to
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TARA L. LYONS protect the investment of those who were already planning to publish the Shakespeare First Folio. See Edwin Eliott Willoughby, A Printer of Shakespeare: The Books and Times of William Jaggard (New York: Haskell House, 1934), 3; Blayney, First Folio, 3; Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book, 56–57; Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, 256; and Murphy, Shakespeare in Print, 40. Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor, 119–21, has proposed that the nine quartos were issued both individually and as a set to whet readers’ appetite for the First Folio, for which Issac Jaggard would take a leading role in printing. 51 Most critics associate the Pavier quartos within the development of dramatic authorship in early modern England. Joseph Loewenstein, for instance, is confident that the Pavier quartos were inspired by Jonson’s folio (1616). See “Authentic Reproductions: The Material Origins of the New Bibliography,” in Textual Formations and Reformations, ed. Laurie E. Maguire and Thomas L. Berger (Cranbury, NJ: Associated U. Press, 1998): 30. Douglas Brooks makes a similar case in From Playhouse, 67. For arguments on how Pavier saw Shakespeare’s death as an opportunity to market his plays, see T. L. Berger’s “Shakespeare Writ Small,” in A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text, ed. Andrew Murphy (Blackwell, 2007), 68. 52 The ten editions that were serial plays were Oldcastle Part 1 (1600), Captain Stuckley (1605), Spanish Tragedy (1602, 1603, 1610), Henry V (1602), Jeronimo Part 1 (1605), A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608), and If you Know Not Me Part 1 (1608, 1610). Those that were apparently not serial plays were Jack Straw (1604), Looking Glass for London and England (1602), and The Fair Maid of Bristow (1605). 53 Arber, Transcript, 3:169. 54 Arber, Transcript, 3:169 and 3:204. 55 Brooks, From Playhouse, 73–74; Peter Corbin and Douglas Sledge, eds., The Oldcastle Controversy: Sir John Oldcastle Part 1 and The Famous Victories of Henry V (Manchester U. Press, 1991), 10–11. 56 Henry V was performed by the Chamberlain’s Men in 1598–99, and Oldcastle Part 1 was performed by the Admiral’s Men in 1599. For more on the shared features of the plays, see Corbin and Sledge, Oldcastle Controversy, 10–25. 57 Henry V was likely an offshoot of the Queen’s Men’s Famous Victories of Henry the fifth: Containing the Honourable Battell of Agin-court (1598) printed by Thomas Creede. 58 As noted above, Oxinden’s collection compiled these plays in this order: Henry V (1600), Oldcastle Part 1 (1600), and The First Part of the Contention (1594). 59 Johnson, “Thomas Pavier,” 25–26. In Johnson’s words, “Pavier’s career also shows that a shrewd publisher of the time could achieve success by negotiating with his colleagues for copyrights which were already established sellers.” 60 Thomas Kyde, The Spanish Tragedie (1602) and Anonymous, The First Part of Jeronimo (1605). While Jeronimo Part 1 represented “the Warres of Portugall, and the life and death of Don Andræa” (as it stated on its title page), The Spanish Tragedy offered “the lamentable end of Don Horatio, and Bel-imperia: with the pittifull death of olde Hieronimo.” Readers who came to Pavier’s shop for one of the tragedies might easily have left with both. See Lukas Erne on the complexities of reading Henslowe’s diary entries on The Spanish
“SHAKESPEARE” IN COLLECTION Tragedy and its prequels or offshoots in Beyond the Spanish Tragedy: A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd (Manchester U. Press, 2001), 14–15. 61 If you know not me, You know no bodie Part 1 was performed by Queen Anne’s Men in 1604–5 along with its sequel, Part 2, and likely in tandem with the Prince’s Men’s 1604 offshoot/prequel, When You See Me, You Know Me. See Knutson, Repertory, 169. A woodcut of Queen Elizabeth graced the title pages of both playbooks in 1608 and 1609, visually reinforcing a connection between the quartos. 62 Anonymous, The Famous Historye of the life and death of Captaine Thomas Stukeley. With his marriage to Alderman Curteis Daughter, and valiant ending of his life at the Battaile of Alcazar (1605). A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608). Knutson discusses in detail the serialization of A Yorkshire Tragedy. The other three parts in the series are not extant. See Repertory, 129–30. 63 Johnson, “Thomas Pavier,” 25, 29–31. Johnson does not note Pavier’s interest in histories, but in his broad-scale analysis of the stationer’s career he reports that “the record of Pavier’s publications during the first decade of his career, from 1600 to 1610, shows that his major interest lay in the publication of ephemera, such as news pamphlets, ballads, and plays. . . . Pavier’s shop at the Royal Exchange was favourably situated for selling items of a ‘news-stand’ variety.” 64 G. K. Hunter draws the correlation between the words “true” or “truth” and history plays in “Truth and Art in History Plays,” Shakespeare Survey 42 (1989): 17. However, Benjamin Griffin challenges Hunter’s claims in Playing the Past, remarking that “the concurrence of ‘history’ with ‘truth’ on [playbook] title-pages is rare: of fifty-one titles printed between 1557 and 1637 as ‘histories,’ only eight are also ‘true’” (7). My argument here is not necessarily that the words on Pavier’s title pages were clearly interpreted as generic markers for “histories” but that within the scope of his publishing oeuvre we can see a pattern of publishing works that claimed to be “true” and those based on past events or figures. This more amorphous conception of “history” as defined by Pavier’s publications is the type that, I propose, allowed him to prescribe these “kinds” of book to readers and helped consolidate the plays that were published as Shakespeare’s in 1619. 65 Many histories and hagiographies in the period were printed with titles referring to the “the life of,” “the death of,” or both “the life and death of ” a prominent religious, political, or historical figure. Some of the earliest were martyrologies, such as Here begynneth the lyf of the holy [and] blessid vyrgyn saynt Wenefryde (1485) printed by Caxton and Here begynneth the lyf of saint katherin of senis the blessid virgin (1492) printed by Winken de Word. We see the phrase used on various titles throughout the sixteenth century referring to figures from both the distant and recent past: The lyfe of Saynt Edwarde co[n]fessour and kynge of Englande (1533), A brefe chronycle concernynge the examinacyon and death of the blessed martyr of Christ syr Johan Oldecastell the lorde Cobham (1544), The tragical death of David Beato[n] Bishoppe of sainct Andrewes in Scotland (1548), A discourse wrytten by M. Theodore de Beza, conteyning in briefe the historie of the life and death of Maister John Calvin (1564), Arthur Golding’s The lyfe of the most godly, valeant and noble capteine and maintener of the trew Christian religion in Fraunce, Jasper Colignie Shatilion (1576), and Upon the life and death of the most worthy, and thrise renowmed knight, Sir Phillip Sidney (1586). The formula continued into the seventeenth century on similar kinds of books, although the trend was to use the phrase on texts that showcased English religio-political figures (some recently deceased), such as Honors fame in triumph riding. Or, The life and death of the late honorable Earle of Essex (1604) and The historie of the life and death of the Lord Cromwell, sometimes Earle of Essex, and Lord Chancellor of England (1609). Of course, as I discuss later, the agents of Shakespeare’s First Folio would use the phrase on a number of its history plays.
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TARA L. LYONS 66 Pavier’s nondramatic historical books include editions of The famous historie of Albions queene (1600, 1601); William Jaggard’s A view of all the right honourable the Lord Mayors of this honorable citty of London. With the personages, and also such chiefe occasions as happened in every severall mayors time (1602); A true discourse, of the late voyage made by the Right Worshipfull Sir Thomas Sherley the yonger, Knight: on the coast of Spaine, (1602); The Historie of Titana, and Theseus (1608); The Historie of Hamblet (1608); and The laudable life, and deplorable death, of our late peerlesse Prince Henry (1612). 67 Calebbe Shillocke, his prophesie: or, the J[e]wes prediction. To the tune of Bragandarie ([1607]). The ballad Calebbe Shillocke in oral form may have inspired the name for Shakespeare’s famous protagonist, but Stephen Orgel proposes that the ballad’s publication was inspired by the play. See Orgel, “Shylock’s Tribe,” in Shakespeare and the Mediterranean: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Valencia, 2001, ed. Tom Clayton, Susan Brock, and Vicente Forés (Newark: U. of Delaware Press, 2004), 43. 68 The full title is The historie of Titana, and Theseus. Verie pleasant for age to avoyd drowsie thoughts: profitable for youth to eschew wanton pastimes: so that to both, it brings the mindes content. Written by W. B. For more on the history’s borrowings from popular romance, see John S. Weld, “W. Bettie’s Titana and Theseus,” PQ 26 (1947): 36–44. 69 The hystorie of Hamblet (1608) is a translation of the French by François de Belleforest, which was a crucial source for Shakespeare’s famous tragedy. Geoffrey Bullough suggests that the success of Shakespeare’s Hamlet prompted the composition and translation of The hystorie of Hamblet, perhaps even using phrases from the quartos. Pavier likely saw the profit potential for an English translation of the story after the proven success of Hamlet in both theaters and in print. See Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, 8 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 7:11. 70 In 1600, The Merchant of Venice was first printed by James Roberts for Thomas Hayes, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600) was published by Thomas Fisher and printed by Richard Bradock. Hamlet (1603) was printed by Valentine Simmes for Nicholas Ling and John Trundell, and Hamlet (1604) was printed by James Roberts and published by Nicholas Ling. 71 On A Looking Glasse, for London and Englande (1602), Pavier published, “Made by Thomas Lodge Gentleman, and Robert Greene. In Artibus Magister.” However, in doing so, the publisher was following precedent. A Looking Glasse was first published in 1594 and 1598 by other stationers and with this same authorial attribution. 72 In William Shakespeare, 140, Wells et al. contend that “the attribution to Shakespeare is probably, in this instance, deliberately dishonest.” 73 As Peter W. M. Blayney, Texts of “King Lear” and Their Origins: Nicholas Okes and the First Quarto (Cambridge U. Press, 1982), 82–83, reminds us, in 1608, Shakespeare’s name may not have held much appeal, for the works on which it appeared did not merit second editions until years after. The phrase “the Authors name is sufficient to vent his worke” was used in the 1622 quarto of Othello. 74 Johnson, “Thomas Pavier,” 25. 75 Arber, Transcript, 3:295. The ballad is not extant.
“SHAKESPEARE” IN COLLECTION 76 Twenty playbook editions were published with Shakespeare’s name on title pages from 1598 to 1610. Of those twenty editions, thirteen had been staged in the theaters as serials or spinoffs, including three editions of Richard II (1598, 1598, 1608), three editions of Richard III (1598, 1602, 1605), three editions of 1 Henry IV (1599, 1604, 1608), one edition of 2 Henry IV (1600), one edition of Loves Labor’s Lost (1598)—which prompted Love’s Labor’s Won, one edition of The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602)—a spinoff of 1&2 Henry IV, and one edition of A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608). The non-serial plays were Much Ado About Nothing (1600), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600), The Merchant of Venice (1600), The London Prodigall (1605), King Lear (1608), and Hamlet (1603, 1604). 77 Three editions of Richard II (1598, 1598, 1608), three editions of Richard III (1598, 1602, 1605), three editions of 1 Henry IV (1599, 1604, 1608), one edition of 2 Henry IV (1600), two editions of Hamlet (1603,1604), and one edition of King Lear (1608). The Merchant of Venice (1600) was called a “historie” and A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608) referred to as “True.” The nonhistorical plays were Love’s Labor’s Lost, Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and The London Prodigall. 78 “The Historie of Troylus and Cresseida” and “Pericles, Prince of Tyre. With the true Relation of the whole Historie” dramatized historical plots and characters from ancient Greece. Although advertised on its title page as a history, Troylus and Cressida is called a comedy in its prefatory materials and positioned as a tragedy in the Folio. 79 Peter Stallybrass and David Kastan discuss Butter’s authorial ascription on the title page of King Lear (1608) as an attempt to differentiate this version of the play from the previously published King Leir (1605). See Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book, 33–35; Stallybrass, “Shakespeare, the Individual, and the Text,” Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Triechler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 597. 80 Johnson, “Thomas Pavier,” 31–33. 81 Pavier published The Spanish Tragedy (1610) and If you Know Not Me You Know Nobody, or The Troubles of Queen Elizabeth (1610). 82 Because “T. P.” for Thomas Pavier only appears on the title page of four of the 1619 quartos, critics have recently proposed that the “Pavier Quartos” are ineptly named. See Cyndia Susan Clegg, “King Lear and Early Seventeenth-Century Print Culture,” King Lear: New Critical Essays, ed. Jeffrey Kahan (New York: Routledge, 2008), 177; and James J. Marino, Owning William Shakespeare: The King’s Men and Their Intellectual Property (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 111. 83 Johnson, “Thomas Pavier,” 33–34. Johnson acknowledges the unusual shift in Pavier’s publishing practices when he issued the ten plays, proposing that it was likely a project developed in collaboration with other publishers, specifically those who held the publishing rights to other Shakespearean plays. When the 1619 quartos were published, Pavier clearly owned the rights to publish The Whole Contention, Henry V, Sir John Oldcastle, A Yorkshire Tragedy, and Henry V. Most likely, Pavier negotiated with other publishers for the rights to publish King Lear, Pericles, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. See Johnson, “Thomas Pavier,” 37–39. 84 With A Yorkshire Tragedy also as a play previously performed with three other works, more than half of the plays included in the Pavier quartos were serials.
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TARA L. LYONS 85 On the conflation of Falstaff and Oldcastle in the early modern imagination, see James Marino, Owning William Shakespeare: The King’s Men and Their Intellectual Property (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 121–24. 86 Johnson, “Thomas Pavier,” 37, also notes that “Pavier, who owned the rights to several history plays ascribed to Shakespeare, may have seen, or been shown, an opportunity to capitalize on these holdings.” Andrew Murphy briefly notes that a number of Pavier’s quartos were histories, but he does not examine how the collection emerged from the stationer’s specialization in historical texts. See Shakespeare in Print, 41. 87 I want to thank Alan Farmer for this insight at the 2011 Shakespeare Association of America Seminar on “Shakespeare for Sale” led by Adam Hooks. 88 Troilus and Cressida (1609), Pericles (1609, 1609, 1611), Hamlet (1611), Richard III (1612), 1 Henry IV (1613), and Richard II (1615) returned again to print. The 1611 edition of Hamlet was no longer marketed as a “Historical Tragedy” but as simply “The Tragedy of Hamlet.” Still, the historical nature of the play was established from the first two quartos and for Pavier with the Historie of Hamblet (1608). 89 Anonymous, The First and second Part of the troublesome Raigne of John King of England. With the discoverie of King Richard Cordelions Base sonne (vulgarly named, The Bastard Fawconbridge. Also, the death of King John at Swinstead Abbey.Written by W. Sh. As they were (sundry times) lately acted by the Queenes Majesties Players (1611). The book was continuously paginated and printed by Valentine Simmes for John Helm. The first quarto of Troublesome Raigne (1591) was not authorially ascribed. 90 These four plays were those published previously by Pavier, and thus, if this project was his initiative, flaunting Shakespeare’s name on title pages was one possible new way to connect the plays to a few other serial and historical plays being sold from his bookstall. Six other plays in the project had been published previously by other stationers and with Shakespeare’s name on their title pages. In 1619, very little was altered from earlier editions; in fact, clear efforts were made to reproduce the design and content of the older title pages, which included the position and formatting of Shakespeare’s name. 91 The title page also notes, “To the tune of, blacke and yellow” (1620). 92 As noted above, Pavier issued another ballad offshoot of Shakespeare’s Merchant in 1608, the same date that appears on the 1619 imprint of the play, perhaps not coincidentally. Theories about the false dates so far have centered on how they accord with Shakespeare’s authorship, but I think it is worth considering how other collection principles, such as seriality and historicity, may have motivated the misdating. 93 The volume has been since disassembled and now holds only The Whole Contention and Pericles. 94 See Knight, “Making Shakespeare’s Books,” 326. 95 A Woman Kilde with Kindnesse.Written by Tho. Heywood. As it hath beene oftentimes Acted by the Queenes Majest. Servants (1617). 96 STC 26101 copy 2. The current volume is in a modern binding with only The Whole Contention and Pericles; the other seven quartos had been previously removed from the
“SHAKESPEARE” IN COLLECTION volume. For more on the dating and provenance of the note, see Jeffrey Todd Knight, “Invisible Ink: A Note on Ghost Images in Early Printed Books,” Textual Cultures 5 (2010): 56, and “Making Shakespeare’s Books,” 326. Records from the University of Virginia Library document another Sammelbänd, no longer extant, that contained the nine 1619 quartos, in which Henry V and Oldcastle were similarly coupled and in that order. See Pollard, Shakespeare Folios and Quartos, 84. 97 The volume is in seventeenth-century calfskin at Texas Christian University. 98 The First Folio was most definitely a collaborative project. The stationers who financed the volume include William and Isaac Jaggard, Edward Blount, William Aspley, and John Smethwick. Fellow members of the King’s Men, Henry Heminges and John Condell, claim in the prefatory materials to have gathered Shakespeare’s plays. 99 For scholars who celebrate the innovation of the First Folio, see Blayney, First Folio, 1, and Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book, 64. For more on the “new” generic categorizations in the volume, see Paulina Kewes, “The Elizabethan History Play: A True Genre?” A Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays, ed. Michael Hattaway and Jean Howard (Blackwell, 2003), 172–75; and Emma Smith, “Shakespeare Serialized: An Age of Kings,” A Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge U. Press, 2007), 146. 100 For debates on the relationship between The Troublesome Raigne and Shakespeare’s King John, see Brian Boyd, “King John and The Troublesome Raigne: Sources, Structure, Sequence,” PQ 74 (1995): 37–56; Ramon Jimenez, “The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England: Shakespeare’s First Version of King John,” The Oxfordian 12 (2010): 21–55; and Beatrice Groves, “Memory, Composition, and the Relationship of King John to The Troublesome Raigne of King John,” Comparative Drama 38 (2004): 277–90. 101 The First and second Part of the Troublesome Raigne of John King of England (1591, 1611, 1622). Scholars dispute whether this earlier play was written by Shakespeare. 102 The play’s head-title, however, retained some enticing details: “The First Part of Henry the Fourth, with the Life and Death of Henry Surnamed Hot-spvrre”; other plays similarly retained some descriptive features from their earlier title pages. 2 Henry VI’s head title states, “The second Part of Henry the Sixt, with the death of the Good Duke Humphrey.” Richard III was called “The Tragedy of Richard the Third: with the Landing of Earle Richmond, and the Battell as Boswroth Field.” The head-title for Henry VIII states, “The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eight.” 103 Kewes, “Elizabethan History Play,” 172–75, 185. Kewes refers to the coherence of the History plays as “ex post facto.” Smith, “Shakespeare Serialized,” 146, makes a similar argument, calling the designation of History plays the product of an “editorial process”: “The specific editorial intervention of the Folio text serves to build a sequence of plays out of a number of previously printed, individually titled, works.” 104 In Shakespeare’s History Plays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948), E. M. W. Tillyard interpreted the histories in the folio as a unified narrative that set forth a providential scheme for England, culminating with the god-appointed reign of Henry VIII and the birth of Elizabeth I. Although it is unlikely that Shakespeare constructed these plays as parts of a larger narrative celebrating the Tudor dynasty, these ten history plays did chart the reigns of seven English kings over a period of 300 years, with the middle seven plays covering four consecutive monarchies (Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI).
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TARA L. LYONS 105 Macbeth, a chronicle history, keeps the phrase on the Catalogue. Edward Burns notes that the formula “the life and death of . . . ” functions as a compromise between the generic and interpretive demands of history and tragedy. “Shakespeare’s Histories in Cycles,” Shakespeare’s History Plays: Performance, Translation, and Adaptation in Britain and Abroad, ed. Ton Hoenselaars (Cambridge U. Press, 2004), 167n2. 106 David Bevington, ed., The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 6th ed. (New York: PearsonLongman, 2009). 107 Stephen Greenblatt et al., eds., The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2008).
Shakespeare’s Theatrical Folio Francis X. Connor
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oughly a decade before the quadricentennial of Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies—more popularly known as the “First Folio”—it seems the celebration has already begun. Anthony James West has already graced us with his history and census, and now he and Eric Rasmussen have published their remarkably comprehensive descriptive catalogue of the folio.1 These are exciting projects, but the market for bibliographic minutiae remains disappointingly small; nevertheless, the First Folio is celebrated in two recent popular biblio-biographies, Paul Collins’s The Book of William and Rasmussen’s The Shakespeare Thefts, both of which revise the romantic conceit of the scholar-adventurer, narrating tales of individual owners of first folios from the time of its initial publication to the present day.2 Admirably bridging the gap between the academic and the mass market, the Folger Shakespeare Library—an institution that secured its prominence in part because of Henry Clay Folger’s aggressive, if not obsessive, Shakespeare folio collection—has recently published Foliomania!: Stories Behind Shakespeare’s Most Important Book, a collection of bibliographic essays on the making of the First Folio coupled with another round of histories of individual copies.3 Though written by experienced scholars speaking ex cathedra from the Folger, its preface states the book “is aimed at a general audience of readers who are familiar with Shakespeare’s works but who may not know about” its creation or subsequent history.4 And so it is, and wonderfully so; the book’s faith that detailed accounts of the book’s paper, type, illustrative processes, and so on will rivet readers is bold and welcome. (Neither Collins nor Rasmussen shares such faith; their accounts of the physical book are perfunctory.) At the very least, these popular accounts demonstrate that even in the age of the Nook and the Kindle, and perhaps the last age of the brick and mortar bookstore, people remain interested in books. Or, at least, people remain interested in books about Shakespeare’s books. No doubt the rapidly thinning shelves of my local Barnes & Noble will continue to fail to stock 221
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a similarly riveting account of someone’s attempt to collect and catalogue Thomas Heywood’s folio publications.5 Collectively, these books narrate the dramatic reception history of the First Folio. This history would not be so exciting (and these books likely never taken on by major publishers) without the cultural significance attached to the First Folio. These books, for the most part, punt on the question of whether or not Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (hereafter CHT) would have been considered culturally significant at the moment of its creation. They do little to consider to whom the book was published for—its target audience. I do not make these observations to criticize these books: thefts, murders, tales of lavish spending are all exciting, and the First Folio has found itself at the center of all of these. Thinking about how a book was advertised is dull, and for a popular account of the First Folio, doing so is simply the table-setting preliminary before the good stuff. Perhaps because of this, popular accounts tend to offer the conventional origin story for the folios. For example, Collins offers the following: Then as now, publishing had an unspoken sumptuary code in which certain sizes, fonts, and papers implied certain genres. For folios that meant a work of reference, theology, or highly regarded ancient authors . . . To print a work in folio implied a certain gravity, a confidence in the greatness of one’s subject. For mere poets and playwrights to use a folio was unheard of, with one crucial exception . . . [Ben Jonson] had the temerity to [publish his Workes] in folio and while still alive. Though poked at the time for vanity at puffing mere theater into Work . . . Jonson’s bold act signaled a fundamental change in how authors understood their profession.6
Almost everything in this paragraph is overstated.7 Theology, history, and some ancient authors did sometimes appear in folio (as well as smaller formats), but this was generally out of convenience rather than out of an attempt to signify the gravity of the subject matter.8 Even by 1623, relatively few classical folio editions had been published in England.9 In contrast, romances—hardly the genre of “highly regarded ancient authors”—became a popular folio genre from the 1590s onward. (One of the key folios of the 1610s was Nicholas de Hebreray’s Amadis de Gaula, published in two volumes in 1618/19, yet it is a book Ben Jonson identifies in his “Execration Upon Vulcan” as one of the “serious follies” of contemporary literary culture.)10 Samuel Daniel, a “mere poet” who demonstrated temerity by publishing a folio Works fifteen years before Jonson, is disappointingly absent from most accounts of the first folio. The comparison with Jonson’s folio is particularly notable, because Shakespeare’s folio is most commonly understood through analogies with Jonson’s.11 His Workes appeared in 1616, collecting most of the work he had
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written to date (much of it remastered by Jonson himself). Much of the criticism of Jonson’s folio treats the book as a unique, unprecedented text that sprung almost entirely from the mind of Ben Jonson. It is frequently considered within narrowly defined contexts such as the apparent literary status of plays, or to a book like King James’s Workes, which conveniently appeared the same year. The title Workes plays an inordinately fundamental role in accounts of Jonson’s folio, in which it is inevitability associated with classical opera—the collected works of major classical writers—and used as evidence of Jonson’s self-fashioning as a laureate poet. While I think this attaches too much significance to what is essentially a generic title, Jonson’s Workes is undeniably an ambitious book that reveals its author’s literary ambitions. These ambitions have, as Collins’s comment illustrates, generally been grafted onto CHT. Even though Shakespeare’s folio uses the generic categories for plays instead of “Works” as a title, its folio format is enough to tie it to Jonson’s book. Collins is not entirely wrong to indicate that some kind of “sumptuary code” was in place for early modern books, but we need to discover what that code was rather than assume such a code into evidence to argue that CHT shares the same canonical ambition as Workes. By attaching Jonson’s book to Shakespeare, or at least by reading the folio format as a sumptuary code, conventional accounts of CHT argue that the publishers of Shakespeare’s folio saw the folio as a totalizing, canonizing book, as Jonson had intended his. In the remainder of this essay, however, I will argue that CHT had rather more modest ambitions than Jonson’s folios. While a point-by-point comparison of the Jonson and Shakespeare folios would extend this article to an interminable length, one fundamental point of difference—their relationship to the marketplaces of the book trade and the theater—conveniently demonstrates the different goals, and the different approaches to and assumptions about literary canonicity posited by each book. In contrast to the totalizing ambitions of Jonson’s Workes, in which the book alone canonizes Jonson’s work, CHT canonizes Shakespeare only insofar as it returns its readers and (more importantly) its buyers to the theater to see his plays. This, I will argue, may be an extension of a theatrical idea of the book that Shakespeare himself put forth in his final singleauthored work, The Tempest, a play that depicts books as useful primarily for the raw material for theater. Reading the prefaces to CHT with a perspective informed by this play, I will argue that the First Folio is a theatrical folio: the prefaces to Shakespeare’s folio not only emphasize the interdependency of the theater and the book, they privilege theater as the important medium, publishing its crucial, but secondary, subsidiary.
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“What ever you do, buy”: The Folio and Its Markets Issac Jaggard had advertised “Playes, written by M. William Shakespeare, all in one volume” in an English-language addendum to the 1622 English printing of the Frankfurt Book Fair catalogue.12 Even before publication, it appears a sales strategy had come into play. This is notable because the idea that Shakespeare’s book was meant to monumentalize Shakespeare leads some to deny its commodity status. Park Honan’s popular Shakespeare biography, for example, claims “the work was not undertaken chiefly for profit.”13 Other accounts downplay the marketing of the book, instead presuming a narrative of the immediate popularity of the first folio: that foliomania ran wild in 1623. For example, in Foliomania!, Steven Galbraith, referring to the prefatory appeal to buy the book by John Heminge and Henry Condell—Shakespeare’s actor peers who apparently helped collect the plays for the book—writes that “they need not have worried about sales,” and that nine years between the first and second folio “suggests that the First Folio sold quite well.”14 This is contestable—the notion that the number of editions correlates to sales or popularity is a canard that desperately needs further interrogation. Such a debate encourages us to overlook that the folio’s editors, and certainly its publishers, were in fact worried about its reception and sales. It may (or may not) have been successful, but its success was absolutely not assured at the time of its publication.15 As David Scott Kastan astutely reminds us, “the commercial context of the folio must not be forgotten,” and despite the book’s high regard today, “all that was clear to [Edward] Blount and his partners [who published the folio] was that they had undertaken an expensive publishing project with no certainty of recovering their considerable investment.”16 The presale announcement is also notable because it is consistent with concerns about the marketability of the folio expressed in its prefatory writing, and because this concern distinguishes CHT from the memorializing ambitions of Jonson. The most obvious way Jonson’s folio may have influenced Shakespeare’s is simply the potential for the format to collect a substantial body of literary writing. CHT was not the first attempt to collect Shakespeare’s plays: in 1618, Thomas Pavier published a number of his plays in quarto editions that may have been meant to be collected and stitched together.17 Pavier’s attempt to publish a complete Shakespeare failed; nevertheless, this odd abortive edition offers a reminder of the uncertainty surrounding literary publication in any format, and it also puts the 1623 publication of CHT into relief: the folio edition would, at the very least, offer unity to the Shakespeare oeuvre.18
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However, if CHT was influenced by the format for Workes, it clearly did not adopt its predecessor’s guarded relationship to the marketplace. Concerns about the book trade permeate Jonson’s Epigrams, but the prefaces to Workes show little sign that Jonson acknowledges the folio as a commodity. The most explicit acknowledgement of its commodity status appears in John Selden’s Latin poem “Ad V[irum]. CL[arissimum]. Ben. Ionsonivm, Carmen protrepticon” [To the most noble Ben Jonson, a hortatory poem], which he lauds as a “nonum librum . . . Qui curis niteat tuis secundis” (¶4r), a “new book . . . [that] will be a splendid Second Edition.”19 Portending a far more optimistic fate for the folio than, say, Jonson’s fearful imagining of unsold copies of his book lining pie plates in “To My Bookseller,” Selden’s poem announces confidence that the folio will sell. In contrast, the two prose prefatory essays to CHT foreground and accept the relationship between the folio and the book trade. These essays identify two markets for the folio: the elite marketplace of the court, and the more various marketplace of the common reader.20 Attributed to John Heminge and Henry Condell,21 both former theatrical associates of Shakespeare, these prefaces initiate the work of grounding the book in the commercial matrix of the theater. The first, an “Epistle Dedicatory” to William, Earl of Pembroke and Philip, Earl of Montgomery, offers a fairly conventional patronage plea. The preface credits the Earls with transforming the plays from “trifles” to a “dignity greater,” and further credits them with inspiring the play’s remediation from the stage to a published book: “For, so much were your LL. [lordships’] likings of the severall parts, when they were acted as, before they were published, the Volume ask’d to be yours.”22 The book, then, was created and exists at their pleasure, and thus the remains of its author, Shakespeare, are “most humbly consecrate” to the Earls in the hope that his reputation will be bolstered by noble patronage. However, having made this conventional patronage plea, the next essay follows a radically different tack, granting the marketplace of book buyers and theatergoers the power previously granted Pembroke and Montgomery, a power that implicitly dilutes their cultural authority.23 “Variety” directly undermines claims of the noblemen’s supposed power to grant dignity to the plays by broadening the anticipated audience for the folio, both with its titular address and its opening line addressing “the most able, to him that can but spell”—no matter what one’s reading level may be, “the fate of all Bookes depends upon your capacities: and not of your heads alone, but of your purses.” It concludes by emphasizing “heads”—the able readership who contribute to preserving Shakespeare’s memory (“Reade him, therefore; and againe, and againe . . .”) but the essay initially focuses on
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the marketplace’s role. The authors’ blunt appeal sharply contrasts the more measured engagement with the marketplace characteristic of most folios: You wil stand for your priviledges wee know: to read, and censure. Do so, but buy it [the folio] first. That doth best commend a Booke, the Stationer saies. Then, how odde soever your braines be, or your wisedomes, make your license the same, and spare not. Judge your sixe-pen’orth, your shillings worth, your five shillings worth at a time, or higher, so you rise to the just rates, and welcome. But, what ever you do, Buy. Censure will not drive a Trade, or make the Jacke go. And though you be a Magistrate of wit, and sit on the Stage at Black-Friars, or the Cock-pit, to arraigne plays dailie, know, these plays have had their triall alreadie, and stood out all Appeals; and now do come forth quitted rather by a Decree of Court, than any purchas’d Letters of commendation.
The terse, imperative appeal “what ever you do, Buy” stands out among the prefatory rhetoric, sharply defining the potential bookbuyer’s role. The essay metaphorically casts the reader as a “magistrate of wit” whose purchase of the book is the entry fee for the position: while anyone can read and discuss the book, only buying it truly signifies approval. The essay argues for the broad, commercial appeal of the folio in its extended courtroom metaphor. As magistrates, potential readers have attended the plays’ “triall”—they have witnessed the plays performed onstage, and Heminge and Condell hope that their memories of their enjoyment of Shakespeare’s plays will encourage them to rule in the plays’ favor and purchase the folio. Making this hope explicit, the essay enters into evidence that the book’s contents have been publicly vetted and approved by virtue of their success on stage: the capacity audiences at Blackfriars and Cockpit are used as evidence that audiences have been willing to “Buy” the plays as performed. Concluding this legal conceit, the editors argue that this trial affirms the plays’ quality much more reliably than “purchas’d Letters of commendation”—such as, a reader may suspect, the dedication to Pembroke and Montgomery. The folio thus grants an authoritative critical perspective to the playgoing audience while casting doubt on the supposedly rarified judgment of its dedicatees. Indeed, the essay consistently privileges the critical perspective of an audience not stratified by class distinctions, but united by their desire to be consumers. The exclusion of The Globe—the theater most associated with Shakespeare’s and the King’s Men’s work—from this passage may suggest that the editors are trying to appeal to a more prosperous audience—both Blackfriars and the Cockpit were somewhat more expensive indoor theaters, compared to the public theater of the Globe. Even if we accept that this appeal attempts to pitch the book to these more rarified theatrical audiences, the passage remains notable for refiguring patronage as a secondary market (albeit a market that must still be made to feel important) to the theatrical
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audience. Whereas many book prefaces ask noblemen to vet and patronize their work, here the patrons, the culturally elite, are presented as paying customers who more or less do what the preface asks of bookbuyers: by paying to enter a theater they buy before they praise or censure. Thus, again the book wants to define its actual patrons as the consumers rather than (or, perhaps, in addition to) Pembroke and Montgomery. Unlike Jonson in, for example, his 1611 preface to Catiline, this essay does not attempt to classify readers or shape their reading practices; any reader, regardless of skill, can contribute to Shakespeare’s memory through purchase of the book—it does not matter whether or not anyone actually reads it.24 If Shakespeare will be remembered, the essay notes, “it is not out province, who only gather his works, and give them to you, to praise him; it is yours, that read him. And there we hope, to your diverse capacities, you will find enough both to draw and hold you” (Hinman). Heminge and Condell admit that their praise, however authentic and sincere, will not “commend” the folio. They hope readers will read and appreciate his book—they remind browsers of his theatrical success—but they can do no more to influence their judgment once they have published his plays. They can, however, encourage you to buy it. Heminge and Condell’s primary concern with the book’s salability, and their linking of commercial success and literary esteem, revise the dedicatory essay’s claims about the book’s cultural role.25 They had claimed to Pembroke and Montgomery that they produced the book “without ambition either of selfe-profit, or fame” but to keep Shakespeare’s memory alive (Hinman); however, “Great Variety” reveals doubt that the folio could preserve his memory without some profit or ambition—those making the book must earn some gain to make the project viable. “Great Variety” does not recognize an inherent memorial function in the book; instead Heminge and Condell recognize success in bookstalls as the key measure of success and engine of memory. The prefaces to Jonson’s folio had promoted the book as a literary and cultural triumph, but CHT downplays claims about its cultural significance and memorial potential by authorizing the book’s potential customers, not the prefatory writers, to adjudicate such matters. Because so many people had so much invested in the book, it would be unwise to read Heminge and Condell as cynical about the role the marketplace plays in book production, and I am not convinced that the passage is intended ironically or as an “elaborate and playful conceit,” as William St. Clair has recently argued.26 Similarly, I am cautious about reading the essay as an attempt to contrast Shakespeare’s popular success to Jonson’s comparative lack of success, as George Donaldson suggests,27 although such a reading would not be incompatible with the commercial ambitions
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expressed in these essays. Instead, I understand their appeal to a broad audience is a similar sort of appeal one would make to a playgoing audience who might be inclined to buy a Shakespeare quarto. These veteran King’s Men pitch their folio just as they would have advertised their theatrical performances in order to maintain the steady clientele necessary to render the public theaters profitable. Heminge and Condell’s essay anticipates overlap between print and theater audiences, and it calls upon an audience who had previously spent their “sixe-pen’orth” on “surreptitious copies.”28 This is not unique to the folio: printed play quartos, simply by advertising the name of the company that had performed the play, frequently recognized the theater and book trade as contingent marketplaces. But that makes it notable that the expensive folio employs a similar strategy, and perhaps indicates that they did not have an elite specialty market in mind. The folio is marketed to patrons of print and staged plays as an improvement over earlier pamphlet publications, while maintaining that Shakespeare’s plays originated in, and continue to be performed in, the theater. As the book makes a case for Shakespeare’s cultural significance, “Great Variety” grounds the book in the marketplaces of both the stage and the bookshop, reminding readers and potential customers that mere prefatory claims of cultural esteem are valueless without success in the market to support them.29
“Burn but his books”: The Theatrical Book in The Tempest “Great Variety” argues from a commercial perspective, noting that the memory is located in a prosperous intersection of consumers, booksellers, and theaters. This is a logical and expected argument for a publisher (worried about income) and Shakespeare’s editors (worried about Shakespeare’s memory and their company’s income) to make. Yet it may also be a capitalist extension of an argument Shakespeare seems to make in The Tempest, a play that defines a book’s value by its relationship to theatrical performance. Arguing that Shakespeare had any singular “idea of the book” is tricky, and particularly fraught in light of recent arguments by Lukas Erne and others that Shakespeare was more amenable to print than conventional scholarship has allowed.30 Shakespeare does not explicitly discuss his own relationship to book culture in his own writing, as other writers, such as Jonson, more overt about their print ambitions did. Yet the interplay between theater and book in The Tempest articulates a model for what I shall term a “theatrical book,” a model that appears to have influenced the way his colleagues imagined CHT’s role in relationship to its author, the stage, and the press. Books figure in many Shakespeare plays: Jack Cade’s angry charge to Lord Saye that “thou hast caused printing to be used”; Lady Capulet’s attempt to
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make Paris palatable to Juliet by comparing him to a “precious book of love”; the “book and volume” of Hamlet’s brain that will record what his ghostly father has revealed; and many more. Nevertheless, it seems that Shakespeare saved his most sustained meditation on books for The Tempest, his final single-authored play: as Shakespeare began to contemplate his retirement and life after the theater, he may have begun to think more seriously about the media that would preserve his life’s labor. It introduces Prospero as a rogue scholar heavily influenced by books: early on, Prospero, speaking of his exile, recalls how Gonzalo “furnished me / From mine owne Library, with volumes, that / I prize aboue my Dukedome.”31 Prospero’s prioritizing books over rule—his bookishness leads to his exile, of course—places books at the center of the play’s plot. Because of this, the play’s presentation of the cultural influence and dramatic potential of books as portrayed in Prospero and Caliban’s understanding of the deposed ruler’s library may allow us a glimpse at Shakespeare’s understanding of the role of books in the theater and the broader culture. Prospero ignores his role as Duke of Milan because he is “rapt in secret studies,” having decided that his “library / Was dukedom large enough” (1.2.78, 187). Caliban recognizes those books are the source of his magical power (“without them / He’s but a sot” [3.2.93–4]), and as such books in The Tempest signal power and authority. However, both characters demonstrate ambivalence about material books, and they instead locate their value in the effects books can potentially produce. Books may provide Prospero power, but his manifestations of his power are theatrical. Ultimately, his masque— his most overtly intimidating display of power in the play—and his renunciation of his powers emphasize the dramatic, the stage, the theatrical rather than the printed, the book, the material. When Prospero finally decides to “abiure” his “rough Magicke,” he promises that he will “break my staffe . . . And deeper than euer Plummet sound / Ile drowne my booke.” This process, which includes Prospero discarding the “Magicke robes” he wears at the beginning of the scene, is also turned into a performance, as indicated by a stage direction, here quoted from the folio: “Heere enters Ariel before: Then Alonso with a franticke gesture, attended by Gonzalo. Sebastian and Anthonio in like manner attended by Adrian and Francisco: They all enter the circle which Prospero had made, and there stand charm’d: which Prospero observing, speakes” (5.1.57.1–6). In the ensuing scene, Prospero changes costumes as he “discase[s]” and wears the hat and rapier that Ariel fetches; while this change occurs Ariel sings “Where the Bee Sucks.” In essence, Prospero performs: he gathers an audience and seats them in a circle to make a show (set to music) of his concluding metamorphosis (complete
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with costume change). Similarly, at the end of the play, Prospero directly appeals to the audience in the theater, begging them to “Let your Indulgence set me free” (Epilogue, 20) allowing them to be the final arbiters of the play, much as Heminge and Condell’s essay “To the Great Variety of Readers” asked readers to commend CHT by buying it. Prospero’s final request, paired with the uncertain state of his onceimportant books at the end of the play, affix a hierarchy of theater over books. The audience’s approval validates his dramatic power, but his books, which had been essential to his governance of the island, are forgotten. Prospero disrobes and may easily break his staff on stage, but we do not actually see him cast away his books—in fact, the play concludes with Prospero sending Caliban to clean his cell, which is, presumably, the study where he kept his library. No longer is Prospero’s library a suitable dukedom. By the play’s end, his books can be casually cast away—or burned by Caliban—as he is restored to Milan. Books do not need to appear onstage in The Tempest—none of the original stage directions call for Prospero “at study” or “with book,”32 nor are we told whether or not Prospero’s library returns with him to Milan. Books remain in the wings throughout the play, generating the magic and plot while remaining mostly invisible.33 As Charlotte Scott argues about books in Shakespeare, “the theatre translates the book . . . in performance, offering its image as ‘unlearned men’s books’ for both the literate and illiterate to ‘read.’”34 This scene clearly does so as Prospero sublimates the book to the drama, marginalizing books as mere objects valuable mostly for their contributions to dramatic production. Caliban shares Prospero’s interest in books as source material for theatrical performance or display, rather than as material objects for reading. He recognizes that Prospero’s power—both his dominion over the island and his theatrical displays—derives from books. But when presented the opportunity to threaten Prospero’s role, he does not attempt to seize Prospero’s books to acquire such power for himself; instead he instructs Stephano and Trinculo to “Burn but his books” (3.2.96). By ordering Prospero’s books burned, he intends a specific means of destruction guaranteed to symbolize his reclaimed dominion over his island. David Cressey, noting the ineffectiveness of book burning as a means of censorship, argues that in early modern England “book burning was a way of displaying power . . . a demonstration of authority, not an annihilation of forbidden words.”35 Book burning offers Caliban the sort of ostentatious display lacking in his first encounter with Stephano and Trinculo, before whom he appears a “very weake” and “a most poore creadulous Monster” (2.2.139–40) to whom he “swear[s] my selfe thy Subject” (145). This display is essential to Caliban’s plan to over-
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throw Prospero, who Caliban believes is powerless—“but a Sot”—without his books. Caliban’s threatened bookburning offers an aggressive inversion of Prospero, for instead of using books for theatrical display, he imagines them as part of a display of power. With this, The Tempest thus offers theater and bookburning as possible manifestations of the book, one creative and the other destructive. That Shakespeare dramatizes both of these opposed characters with a similar theatrical understanding of the book reveals, I believe, Shakespeare’s own conception of the book as primarily a tool for performance.
Shakespeare’s Book and Fame: The Prefatory Lyrics and the First Folio The Shakespearean book as imagined in The Tempest emphasizes the theatrical event over the material book, and the folio itself is generally faithful to this idea by presenting itself as a memorial incomplete without the validation of performance. As Colin Burrow has argued, “the limitations of material vehicles [such as books] for conveying mental realities is a strong unifying thread in Shakespeare’s poetic oeuvre.”36 The folio’s creators evince Burrow’s claim in their decision to construct CHT as a theatrical book— that is, by offering it as an object that cannot by itself preserve Shakespeare’s reputation, but will direct readers to the theater where his work and memory receive their proper everlasting memorial. In summary, CHT’s preliminary essays and poems praise the book and Shakespeare in theatrical terms; even when they promote the folio’s role in preserving Shakespeare’s reputation, they always return the book to the stage. As a self-fashioned product of the stage, the book openly engages the capitalist underpinnings of the theater—CHT does not assume it will succeed because it appeals to a select, discriminate audience; instead, it approaches all book buyers as potential customers. The essay “To the Great Variety of Readers” is thus central to the folio’s marketing strategy because it explicitly (and gracefully) places the author’s reputation in the purses of consumers at theaters and bookstalls rather than the auspices of patrons or the imperfect materiality of the book. Indeed, Shakespeare’s folio may have been a somewhat less risky production than popularly thought because it enters this established synergy between the book trade and the theater. Roslyn Lander Knutson has argued that “playing companies relied on a cooperative workforce of playwrights who could readily supply scripts . . . that were marketable on stage and, when some advantage to the companies presented itself, at the bookshop.”37 Her account does not discuss the folio, but Shakespeare’s death in 1616
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certainly offered an advantage and opportunity for the King’s Men to use his posthumous popularity to cement their theatrical reputation. Shakespeare’s King’s Men colleagues permeate the book, from the introductory essays by Heminge and Condell that take credit for the book’s textual labor, to the inclusion of “The Names of the Principall Actors in all these Playes,” which lumps current and former actors together without assigning them to specific roles (Hinman). Unlike Ben Jonson’s Workes, CHT does not include individual acting lists or the dates of initial performance for each of the individual plays: the list of “Principall Actors” is the only historical information on the plays’ performances. This (perhaps slightly paradoxically) makes CHT more of a living theatrical book than Jonson’s: whereas Jonson tethers his plays to the past and situates them in the moment of their first performance and the cast of that performance (a fixedness Jonson desires through the printing of his plays), Shakespeare’s plays are unburdened by history and may be played againe, and againe.38 In general, Hugh Craig’s summary of the two writers’ approach toward print seems rather precise: “Jonson explicitly prefers the book to any physical funeral monument for preserving the memory of the writer,” while Shakespeare “thought the performance of his plays the proper mode of publication.”39 For early modern readers and publishers, printed plays were materially (albeit not necessarily culturally) akin to pamphlets: Tessa Watt, in her groundbreaking study on “cheap print” and pamphlets, associates ballad and chapbook production with play publication, grouping all of these as “ephemeral or ‘popular’” material.”40 Most quarto plays were fairly austere eight- or nine-sheet pamphlets, probably too small to necessitate binding. While the conventional literary narrative is that Shakespeare’s folio was key to elevating the drama from its chapbook grubbery and turning it into an authentic literary genre, I want to posit that CHT could be constructed and sold because plays were cheap entertainment—they are not collected in folio in an attempt to elevate the genre, but because drama was a popular genre. It is not merely on the stage that the book and theater are synergetic, but in the market as well. Douglas Bruster delineates how the theatrical and print markets were connected when he outlines the “essential commercialism” of the early modern theater. The business of theater, he argues, was not confined to the stage and its patrons, but to carpenters, watermen, or other local businesses. Publication became a natural extension of theatrical commercialism: printed plays, besides being potentially profitable commodities in themselves, also advertised the theaters and players who performed the plays, thus doubling as promotional tools.41 Most immediately relevant to printed plays, Zachary Lesser observes that, while some playbooks of
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the early seventeenth century added prefaces “explicitly to distance their plays from the theatre,” most publishers “appealed to a play’s performance onstage and expected their customers to be theatergoers themselves.”42 This observation again encapsulates the key difference between Jonson’s folio and the historical distance it seeks from the theater, and CHT, which defines itself as part of an ongoing theatrical marketplace. Where Jonson’s book is his monument, Shakespeare’s book is part of a living monument reliant on its contents being embodied onstage. CHT immediately establishes the folio as an extension of Shakespeare’s theatrical career with its opening portrait and its companion poem, Ben Jonson’s “To the Reader” (attributed to B. I.). Immediately, the folio announces its modesty: it does not have the elaborate title page illustrations of the Philip Sidney or Jonson folios, nor does its Martin Droeshout portrait crown Shakespeare with laurel, as in Michael Drayton’s portrait in his 1619 folio Poems. Instead, Ben Jonson’s prefatory poem highlights the inadequacy of the illustration. In “To the Reader,” Jonson recognizes that the folio’s portrait could not “drawe his [Shakespeare’s] wit,” but this may be rectified if the reader “looke / Not on his Picture, but his Booke” (Hinman). This request acknowledges the limitations of the folio even as it asks the reader to identify it with its author: the portrait cannot accurately describe Shakespeare, yet the “Booke,” Jonson infers, may. Considering that the folio collects only Shakespeare’s plays, it may be worth reading “Booke” both as the folio and in its theatrical sense, as a playbook, the script that actors would use as the basis for performance. Reading “Booke” as the folio, the object contains and hopefully preserves Shakespeare’s labor, but the failure of the portrait to “haue drawen his wit” is already established as a failure of the folio and a limitation of the book. But as a play-Booke, the folio successfully maintains continuity between Shakespeare’s fame as a dramatist and as a printed author; the stage can augment the material book. Together, the poem and portrait introduce the potential of the folio to be a monument to Shakespeare that allows him to live despite his bodily death. The prefaces often return to claims of the book as monument to Shakespeare, and maintain that Shakespeare remains alive through the book. However, these monumental images always return the book to the theater, imagining, much as Shakespeare did with Prospero and Caliban, that books are necessary as content for the stage. Read together, these prefaces ultimately argue that Shakespeare’s posthumous life, though assisted by the book, primarily remains a theatrical afterlife. For example, Hugh Holland’s prefatory contribution “Vpon the Lines and Life of the Famous Scenicke Poet, Master William Shakespeare,” recognizes
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Shakespeare’s audience as primarily theatrical, imagining them wringing their hands because “done are Shakespeares dayes,” and he will write no more “dainty Playes / Which made the Globe of heau’n and earth to ring.” Holland concludes that Shakespeare’s work will last—“The life yet of his lines shall neuer out.” Unlike the folio’s other prefaces, Holland never uses the folio as evidence that Shakespeare’s work will last: Shakespeare’s plays are “clapt” at “the Globe,” not necessarily read (Hinman).. Leonard Digges’s prefatory poem more overtly credits the role the book will play in preserving Shakespeare’s work, but even so he qualifies his claims that the book can adequately do so. His dedicatory poem recalls Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55, although he transforms it from a poet’s (perhaps ironic) claim to immortality into an argument that the book will only preserve Shakespeare in consort with the theater. “This Booke, / When Brasse and Marble fade, shall make thee looke / Fresh to all Ages,” Digges argues, hoping next that “eu’ry Line, each Verse / Here shall reuiue, redeeme thee from thy Herse.” This redemption, however, maintains a theatrical component: Digges hopes the book will improve the contemporary theater. He contrasts Shakespeare’s success onstage to the current “bankrout Stage” by using Romeo, Juliet, and his “parlying Romans” as evidence of Shakespeare’s dramatic skill (Hinman). For Digges, the book’s accomplishment is not merely its preservation of Shakespeare’s work, but its continued influence on the stage. Digges claims the folio has given “The World thy Workes,” employing “works” in a Jonsonian sense: the included texts are, as the finished product of his literary labor, Shakespeare’s true monument.43 However, unlike anything in the prefaces to Jonson’s folio, the poem by I. M. (James Mabbe) that shares the page with Digges’s work emphasizes how Shakespeare’s “works” result from his career in the theater more than the book. Nearly every line contains a theatrical metaphor (“Stage,” “Tyring-roome,” “Spectators,” “enter with applause,” and so on). His acknowledgement of the folio as “thy printed worth”—one of two lines without a theatrical term, and the only book metaphor in the brief poem—defines the book’s value as a historical document that will remind readers—imagined here as “Spectators”—of the praise Shakespeare received in the theater. The book, then, is Shakespeare’s “Re-entrance”: not simply a static monument, but a return to a public, popular audience of readers as well as playgoers. Together these three poems affirm the primacy of Shakespeare’s theatrical life and the secondary importance of his bibliographic afterlife, and, in doing so, they offer a clearer apology for the folio than the earlier prefaces. Like books in The Tempest, the prefatory poems imagine the folio as a playbook, something that will be used and acted, and not simply something that will sit on a shelf.
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These prefaces recognize the folio as useful for preserving his memory, and while they certainly do not reject books or print as inadequate media for drama, they agree that the theater is the proper foundation for Shakespeare’s fame. Ben Jonson’s address “To the Memory of My Beloved, The Author Mr. William Shakespeare: And what he Hath Left Us” similarly supports the cultural work of the folio and its attempt to honor Shakespeare and his work. Discussing the preliminaries to the folio in his Foliomania! essay, Steven Galbraith concludes that Jonson’s poem argues that “Shakespeare’s reputation” and “the prestige of the first folio . . . are inseparable.”44 Such a reading implies that the folio was designed to preserve Shakespeare’s memory, and Jonson and others found the book necessary to do so. But, reading Jonson in the context of the other prefatory CHT poems, Jonson similarly seems to accept a more limited role for the book, perhaps an acknowledgment that books cannot properly memorialize a professional dramatist (and thus perhaps something of a revision of his ambitions for his 1616 Workes.) On the other hand, Jonson may use his preface to cast himself as an arbiter of the relationship between media and memory, and what I will identify as his argument that Shakespeare should be remembered more for his theatrical work than for his book may be understood as a self-serving, backhanded compliment, one that would cordon off his Workes from this more commercially oriented folio. Even if this is the case, Jonson’s argument nevertheless seems grounded in those of CHT’s other prefatory writers and Tempest-era Shakespeare. He contributes to the folio’s prefatory admiration of Shakespeare as an ever-living author: “And art alive still, while thy book doth live.” But in the poem’s opening lines, he (disingenuously, of course) worries whether he is “thus ample to thy book and fame,” a query that subtly, but importantly, distinguishes “book” and “fame”—while Jonson recognizes that both may be compatible, neither is necessary for the other.45 Shakespeare, Jonson argues, is a special case because this play collection is published, but he does not necessarily need the book for fame. Jonson does not expressly disagree with the folio’s other prefatory contributors, but his unique perspective on the book, perhaps colored by his disappointment in the direction of the book trade during the 1620s, results in a dedicatory poem that is ultimately ambivalent about CHT’s potential as a monument. Jonson’s “To the Reader” invited a comparison between his folio and Shakespeare’s by presenting Shakespeare as an author of the kind he imagined in his own Workes, and his second poetic contribution to the folio begins similarly. Jonson plies Shakespeare to his critical framework when he opens the poem by identifying himself as an “extradordinarie” reader
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whose praise is more meaningful than the “blind affection” (9) or “seeliest ignorance” (7) of readers who uncritically praise Shakespeare. Having affirmed himself as an authoritative critic, Jonson imagines Shakespeare as an artisan honing his work in terms familiar from his Timber and elsewhere: And, that he, Who casts to write a liuing line, must sweat, (such as thine are) and strike the second heat Vpon the Muses anuile: turne the same, (And himselfe with it) that he thinks to frame; Or for the lawrell, he may gaine a scorne, For a good Poet’s made, as well as borne. And such wert thou. (58–65)
This imagery accords with Jonson’s idea of writing as “work,” as a polished and coherent piece of writing:46 Shakespeare earns praise because he is a literary laborer, like Jonson himself. This is an odd section considering Jonson’s conception of Shakespeare as “of an open, and free nature,” and who did not perform the work necessary to craft his poetry (“Would he had blotted a thousand” lines, Jonson lamented, revealing he thought Shakespeare less industrious at the anvil than he needed to be).47 Indeed, the poem includes Jonson’s famously subtle slight that Shakespeare “hadst small Latin and Less Greek” (31), which defines Shakespeare as a natural, rather than a learned poet. Ultimately Jonson’s explicit praise of Shakespeare’s “welltuned and true-filed lines” (68) outweigh his more subtle criticism—the poem does not overtly express his blunt assessments from Timber and Drummond—and Jonson here acknowledges Shakespeare as something of an heir to Jonson’s folio author. Though that passage may support George Donaldson’s claim that in Jonson’s “imagining of Shakespeare is Shakespeare remade a figure like Jonson himself,”48 the bulk of the poem actually highlights a crucial difference between the two authors: Jonson recognizes that neither Shakespeare nor CHT share the bibliographic ambitions that influenced his own Workes. Although Jonson uses his space in the book to publicly praise Shakespeare, he refrains from affirming that the folio will certainly secure Shakespeare’s fame, and ultimately his poem is unclear about the role the folio will actually play. As Jonson makes his case for Shakespeare’s fame, however, he finally severs the connection between “book” and “fame” as he turns his focus away from the folio book—and books—and toward the stage. Like the other folio prefaces, the bulk of Jonson’s praise is couched in a theatrical lexicon, reminding readers of Shakespeare’s fame as a dramatist rather than praising him as a man in print. He first compares Shakespeare to his relative con-
SHAKESPEARE’S FOLIO
temporaries Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, and Francis Beaumont. Although Jonson likely refers primarily to the authors’ built memorials in Westminster, the contrast between them and Shakespeare’s folio invites a bibliographic comparison as well: My Shakespeare, rise; I will not lodge thee by Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lye A little further, to make thee a roome: Thou art a Moniment without a tomb, And art aliue still, while thy Booke doth liue, And we haue wits to read, and praise to giue . . . (19–24)
Chaucer and Spenser had previously been published in folio volumes, but the poem implies that neither folio would necessarily serve as a precedent for associating literary immortality and folio publication. Chaucer had not been published in any format since 1602, and Spenser’s work had appeared in what Steven Galbraith usefully described as a “build-it-yourself edition,” an edition that let readers decide what works to include in their Spenser folio, and thus the bibliographic opposite of Jonson’s comprehensive and integral Workes, and closer to Pavier’s aborted edition than CHT. Jonson diminishes these poets who had been published in folio by indicating that their books inadequately preserved their memories—they need built memorials to supplement their books, tombs to remind others of their fame. Shakespeare’s folio, in contrast, is “a Moniment without a tombe” because Shakespeare will continue to live so long as “we have wits to read, and praise to give.” Jonson’s initial description of Shakespeare’s book is consistent with other prefatory conceits that Shakespeare will continue to live in his book—his book is a monument, not a tomb, whereas the folios of Chaucer and Spenser must be both. If we continue to read Jonson’s allusions bibliographically, the inclusion of the dramatist Francis Beaumont complicates the poem because it acknowledges the uncertainty of the relationship between books and literary fame. Beaumont, unlike Spenser and Chaucer, had never been published in folio, and indeed his publication record before 1623 is remarkably thin, his name having only appeared on three printed books (all as a coauthor with John Fletcher) despite his fame as a playwright.49 Yet, through the theater, he remains a name recognizable enough to reside near the folio authors Chaucer and Spenser. Similarly, the following list of English dramatic “peers” Shakespeare will “outshine” also have thin publication histories.50 No John Lyly plays are known to have been printed after 1601.51 Thomas “sporting” Kyd’s name only appeared in print in a 1594 translation of Robert
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Garnier’s Cornelie, despite the popularity of The Spanish Tragedy.52 Christopher Marlowe had more recent printings—Edward II had been reprinted in 1622, and Doctor Faustus in 1619—but his poem Hero and Leander was more often reprinted than any of his plays, and other of his plays had been out of print for decades.53 Of the classical writers listed, only Terence had a recent, substantive body of work recently in print in England.54 Shakespeare may outshine his peers, at least in part because of CHT, but Jonson’s poem implies that folio publication, or a robust publication history at all, was not necessary to preserve a dramatic writer’s name. I do not imagine it was Jonson’s overt intention to use the bibliographic lives of these writers to demonstrate the unstable relationship between print and dramatic fame; his design primarily appears to have been to establish a canon of dramatic authors and create a privileged space in that canon for Shakespeare. However, in a folio where the other prefatory texts had either placed the value of the folio in relationship to the marketplace (Heminge and Condell’s essays) or performance (the prefatory poems, Shakespeare’s Tempest), Jonson can be read as admitting that, at least for contemporary playwrights, the stage itself remains another way to preserve their fame without book. This reading may be supported when Jonson concludes his dedicatory poem by returning to the theater and defining it as the place where Shakespeare’s fame will really last. Despite its folio format, CHT does not necessarily ensure that Shakespeare will live, so Jonson wants this living Shakespeare on the stage, not the page: Jonson wishes “to hear thy buskin tread / and shake a stage,” a “triumph” in which “all Scenes of Europe homage owe” (36–37, 41–42). Jonson’s lexicon is theatrical; his images are visual and auditory, not the language or images of reading or books. In his conclusion, Jonson hopes not only to “see” the poet as a book, but also to see him “with rage, / Or influence, chide or cheer the drooping stage” (72, 77–78). Shakespeare may be unique because of this published collection, but Jonson implies that, for a playwright, the theater is the proper place for his work, and that will determine whether he sits next to his ancient and modern dramatic peers. Jonson and the other prefatory writers’ description of CHT’s role in Shakespeare’s memory and theater culture asks us to think about who will “have wits to read, and praise to give” Shakespeare. The key figurative reading of Jonson’s line is that the folio will memorialize Shakespeare so long as people read English. In the context of the prose and poetic prefatory writings, English literary culture—both readers and writers—does not exist outside of the print and theatrical marketplaces. Heminge and Condell’s appeal to readers to buy the book, and the many prefatory reminders of the book’s
SHAKESPEARE’S FOLIO
ties to the marketplace of the theater (drawing, I think significantly, from Shakespeare’s own conception of the subordinate relationship of the book to performance), ultimately limit the folio’s role in memorializing Shakespeare and his work. CHT, therefore, assesses the book’s most important role as a commodity that preserves Shakespeare’s reputation only because it results from the theatrical marketplace that established Shakespeare and maintains his fame. The marketplace of the theater, CHT ultimately shows, is the engine preserving Shakespeare’s fame: buying the book and attending the plays matters more than the material book’s potential to memorialize him. By looking at the folio as a commodity and a theatrical book, one that strove for a popular audience and continued life on the stage, the recent popular accounts I cite at the beginning of this essay seem an organic and welcome contribution to the history of Shakespeare and his most famous book. Thanks to institutions like the Folger, his books are indeed preserved, and Collins, Rasmussen, and the Foliomania! contributors assure its fame. This is all the more reason I wish such accounts would consider why, and for whom, the folio was published: if we try to understand this folio from the perspective of the singular cultural icon that Shakespeare has become, we read that back into the folio itself and see it also as a singular cultural artifact rather than ink and paper. Doing so has, I feel, overlooked the way Shakespeare the Author remained unsettled before the First Folio, and how this and other publications shaped contemporary perceptions of Shakespeare by the ways they marketed him to contemporary readers. This is changing, of course, and this essay contributes to discussions about the marketing of Shakespeare by arguing that Heminge, Condell, and other contributors to the folio were less interested in creating the book as a monument to Shakespeare, and more interested in persevering his ties to the theater and thus maintaining the commercial fortunes of the King’s Men by insisting that Shakespeare’s memory is not dependent upon this folio, but will live on when his plays are performed in the theater. While this claim is not entirely incompatible with arguments that Shakespeare and the King’s Men were more engaged with print than many critics have allowed, the question of whether or not dramatic authors, including unquestionably print-oriented playwrights like Ben Jonson, privilege one medium or the other—using print to promote their dramatic work or vice versa—remains relatively unexplored, and could be a profitable approach to rethinking early modern notions of “literary authorship.” In Shakespeare’s case, books were a means to the stage, and whether we read the plays or see them we catch a bit of Foliomania!
Wichita State University
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NOTES 1
Anthony James West, The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book, 2 vols. (Oxford U. Press, 2001–3); Eric Rasmussen and Anthony James West, The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
2
Paul Collins, The Book of William (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009); Eric Rasmussen, The Shakespeare Thefts: In Search of the First Folios (New York: Palgrave, 2011).
3
For Folger’s folios and the founding of the Folger Shakespeare Library, see Peter W. M. Blayney, The First Folio of Shakespeare (Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1991), 41–46. Owen Williams and Caryn Lazzuri, eds., Foliomania! Stories Behind Shakespeare’s Most Important Book (Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library: 2011).
4
Williams and Lazzuri, Foliomania!, vii.
5
Thomas Heywood had three works published in folio: Troia Britanica: or, Great Britaines Troy (1609), Gynaikeion: or, Nine bookes of various history, Concerninge women (1624), and The Heirarchie of the blessed angells (1635), and he at least considered publishing his own plays in the format (see Benedict Scott Robinson, “Thomas Heywood and the Cultural Politics of Play Collections,” SEL 42 [2002]: 361–80.) Why does he not incur foliomania?
6 Collins, Book of William, 25–26. 7
My current book project, Imagining the Book: Publishing Literature in Folio in Early Modern England, will discuss folio publication in more detail than I can offer here.
8
Steven Galbraith uses the term “folios of necessity” to categorize books that had to appear in folio because their contents could not be easily contained in one smaller format volume. Similarly, he identifies some folios as “folios of economy” that would have been cheaper in folio than in a smaller format. Only some folios count as “folios of luxury,” folios made without regard to cost. While Galbraith limits his essay to literary folios, these concepts are useful for all early modern genres. “English Literary Folios 1593–1623,” Tudor Books and Readers, ed. John N. King (Cambridge U. Press, 2010).
9
Books of classical authors published in England tended to be octavos or smaller formats, perhaps in conscious imitation of the Aldine model, introduced to England (more or less) by Wynkyn De Worde; Paul Needham, “Res papirea: Sizes and Formats of the Late Medieval Book,” Rationalisierung der Buchherstellung im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Peter Rück (Marburg: Institut Für Historische Hilfswissenschaften, 1994), 130–35, offers a handy primer on “The Aldine Shape.” Virgil was never published in folio in England during Shakespeare’s lifetime. Chapman’s Homer would be published in folio, but apparently sold poorly: most “editions” are nonce editions of unsold sheets of previous editions. Ovid and Lucan, too, were published in folio—albeit small folios, probably produced from smaller sheets, not appreciably larger than a quarto.
10 Ben Jonson, “An Execration Upon Vulcan,” in Ian Donaldson, ed., Ben Jonson: A Critical Edition of the Major Works (Oxford U. Press, 1985). Subsequent quotes from Jonson are keyed to this edition by line number for poems and page number for prose.
SHAKESPEARE’S FOLIO 11 A comprehensive listing of scholarship on Jonson’s folio would take several articles, but a few representative works that illustrate, to varying degrees, my observations about the writing on Jonson’s folio in this paragraph include: Richard C. Newton, “Jonson and the (Re)Invention of the Book,” Classic and Cavalier: Essays on Jonson and the Sons of Ben, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (U. of Pittsburgh Press, 1983); Jennifer Brady and W. H. Herendeen, eds., Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio (Newark, DE: U. of Delaware Press), 1991; James Riddell, “Ben Jonson’s Folio of 1616,” The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson, ed. Richard Harp and Stanley Stewart (Cambridge U. Press, 2000); Douglas Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House (Cambridge U. Press, 2000); Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge U. Press, 2002). 12 Blayney, First Folio, 7–8. CHT was listed in a catalogue of books intended to be published between April and October 1622. 13 Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford U. Press, 1999), 404. 14 Steven Galbraith, “The First Folio, Illustrated,” in Williams and Lazzuri, Foliomania!, 3. Heminge’s name is traditionally spelled “Heminges,” but, because both prefatory essays I discuss in this article are attributed to “Heminge,” I spell his name that way throughout. His name in the “Names of the Principall Actors,” however, is spelled “Hemmings.” 15 With the recent attention to the history of the book, such denials have been less common. Laurie Maguire, “Shakespeare Published,” Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide, ed. Stanley Wells and Lena Cowen Olin (Oxford U. Press, 2003), 586, e.g., notes the “unmistakable fiscal tension” in Heminge and Condell’s prefaces. More immediately relevant, Gary Taylor’s forthcoming project on publisher Edward Blount argues that the folio was such a failure that it may have sunk his publishing business: see “Making Meaning Marketing Shakespeare, 1623,” From Performance to Print in Shakespeare’s England, ed. Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 61. 16 David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge U. Press, 2001), 78. 17 The complex legal and bibliographical circumstances surrounding the Pavier quartos lie outside the scope of my argument. Information on Pavier’s edition may be found in Sonia Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge U. Press, 2007), 106–35. See also Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge U. Press, 2007), 36–41; John Jowett, Shakespeare and Text (Oxford U. Press, 2007) 69–72. Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge U. Press, 2003), 255–58, makes a case that the Pavier quartos are the “Stolne, and surreptitious copies” referenced in “Great Variety.” Erne’s suggestion that the folio’s editors would need to “cry down” Pavier’s quartos “to praise their own edition” (256) reminds us that cheap quarto pamphlets and expensive folios competed for customers in the same marketplace. For more on Pavier, see Tara L. Lyons’s contribution to this volume. 18 The facts surrounding the folio’s publication and the design of the book itself may be conveniently found in Blayney, First Folio; Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book, 50–178; Jowett, Shakespeare and Text, 69–92. 19 Selden’s poem is from The Workes of Benjamin Jonson (London, 1616), ¶4r; the translation appears in D. H. Craig, Ben Jonson: The Critical Heritage (New York: Routledge, 1996), 99. 20 I use the term “common reader” in the spirit of Richard D. Altick, particularly his in-
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FRANCIS X. CONNOR troduction to The English Common Reader (U. of Chicago Press, 1957), 1–8, as a neutral term to refer to readers who buy and read books for reasons other than professional development; it is not intended as a pejorative term, nor does it imply anything about class or social status. 21 Heminge and Condell’s authorship of these essays has been questioned, notably by W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio: Its Bibliographical and Textual History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 17–18, who finds their “distinctly literary quality” more characteristic of “a practiced hand” such as Ben Jonson’s. While I would not be surprised if they did not write the essay, the fact that Heminge and Condell sign it supports my overall point of the theatricality of the volume. The essay would read rather differently if signed by, say, Edward Blount or Jonson. 22 Charlton Hinman, The First Folio of Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1996). Quotations from the Folio’s prefaces come from this edition, hereafter cited parenthetically as “Hinman.” Citations from Shakespeare’s works are keyed to William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford U. Press, 1986). 23 It may be worth thinking about whether the juxtaposition of these essays responds to Shakespeare’s own critiques of the patronage system in the plays and poems. Timon of Athens, particularly the character of the Poet seeking Timon’s patronage, may be a particularly rich text upon with to base such an argument; Coppelia Kahn, “‘Magic of bounty’: Timon of Athens, Jacobean Patronage, and Maternal Power,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 35, argues that through “the grammar afforded by patronage. . . . Shakespeare voices the appeal and the peril of largesse, magnificence, and royal gifts.” 24 The quarto’s prefatory essays address two distinct, imagined audiences: “To the Reader in Ordinarie” mocks a potential reader/customer of the quarto as “medling” and powerless because “neither praise, nor dispraise from you can affect mee.” Jonson anticipates the reader’s “foolish prayse” or the “vexation of Censure,” and, because such readers are so unimaginative, he even lists the parts of the play he anticipates this reader will like and dislike. In contrast, Jonson submits “my selfe, and worke” to the “Reader extraordinary” (Catilline [London, 1611], A3r). The book’s dedicatee, William Earle of Penbrooke [sic], is this sort of reader who embodies the “light” that will cut through “so thicke, and darke an ignorance” of the sort expressed by the Reader Ordinarie, who prefers jigs to Jonson’s “legitimate Poeme” (A2v–r). 25 Anticipating my argument, Julie Stone Peters, Theatre of the Book, 1480–1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe (Oxford U. Press, 2000), 29, suggests that “Great Variety of Readers” may “supplant” the more conventional dedication. 26 William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge U. Press, 2004), 145–46. St. Clair argues that the cost of the folio would have prevented it from being read by a great variety of readers. Because of this necessarily limited audience, Heminge and Condell’s appeal for readers to buy the book is perhaps meant to be read ironically. However, while CHT would be priced as a high-end book, the Folio would not have been unobtainable for a general audience. But this did not necessarily exclude them from readers of modest means—as Charles R. Forker, “How Did Shakespeare Come by His Books?” Shakespeare Yearbook 14 (2004): 113, notes, even a relatively impoverished reader like Jonson in the 1620s could assemble a fairly substantial library that included folios. In particular, I think more attention needs to be paid to the availability and use of credit in the book trade. For starters, see Blayney, First Folio, 29, on “borrowing on deposit”; his suggestion that booksellers may have lent “books for a fee” intriguingly introduces the possibility that bookseller/bookbuyer transactions could involve more than simple point-of-sale transactions. St. Clair himself muses that the essay’s references to the retail
SHAKESPEARE’S FOLIO price of the book may indicate that, since each generic section is separately paginated, it could have been sold separately, and customers may have been able to pay for the book in installments. While possible, and not unprecedented in the period (the Edmund Spenser folios of the 1610s would be a recent example; see Steven Galbraith, “Spenser’s First Folio: The Build-It-Yourself Edition,” Spenser Studies 21 [2006]: 21–49), it has not yet been demonstrated that CHT was sold this way. Finally, Anthony James West, “Ownership of Shakespeare First Folios Over Four Centuries,” The Library 10 (2009): 406, has recently established that more than three quarters of Shakespeare folios with identifiable seventeenth-century owners were owned by nonaristocratic (“commoner” or “middle”) people, only 16 percent by noblemen, and 6 percent by libraries and other institutions, again suggesting a popular, nonexclusive audience for the folio. It is, of course, possible that these numbers may not be entirely representative of folio sales, although, if anything, West’s evidence may overestimate the percentage of folios owned by noble families and institutions, both of whom are more likely to preserve their books and/or leave records of ownership. 27 George Donaldson, “The First Folio: ‘My Shakespeare’/‘Our Shakespeare’: Whose Shakespeare?” Shakespeare’s Book, ed. Richard Meek, Jane Rickard, and Richard Wilson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 194. 28 John B. Thompson, Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005), 44, observes that “publishing fields are not secluded and self-sufficient worlds but are commonly linked to other social fields, and in some cases they may be deeply interwoven with these other fields through complex forms of interdependency.” Thompson uses modern academic publishing as an example, but I think the relationship between the fields of the book trade and the theater in early modern London is similar. In Thompson’s example, the academic field offers advice and input on what publishers should publish, and each field contains liminal members who can navigate and address the concerns of both (44–46). Similarly, Heminge and Condell bridge the publishing and theater fields in Shakespeare’s folio, providing the texts for the folio’s publishing consortium and using their success on stage to argue for their potential success as a book. 29 Contrast Donaldson, “First Folio,” 204, who argues from an analysis of the prefatory writings that “The First Folio’s full audacity is to claim that it puts its readers directly in touch not only with [Shakespeare’s] hand, but also with Shakespeare’s mind.” 30 Erne, Shakespeare As Literary Dramatist. 31 The First Part of the Contention, 4.7.27–31; Romeo and Juliet, 1.3.81–96; Hamlet, 1.5.98– 104; The Tempest, 1.2.168–69. 32 Neither direction would be unusual in a playtext; see the entries for “book” and “study” in Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 (Cambridge U. Press, 1999). 33 Similarly, when Caliban makes Stephano and Trinculo swear to his plan, he asks them to “kiss the book” (2.2.124, 1136), the “book” being a bottle of sack, used by Caliban as a bible. Charlotte Scott, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Book (Oxford U. Press, 2007), 167, 171, observes the absence of the material book in The Tempest, arguing that “all we see of the book . . . is the chaos of its absence,” and thus “the book is denied its dramatic space, to enable chaos to control the mimetic order.” However, the events of the play, and the resolution at the end, result from Prospero’s book-learned magic, suggesting the books have more agency in the play than Scott imagines.
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FRANCIS X. CONNOR 34 Scott, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Book, 17. 35 David Cressey, “Book Burning in Tudor and Stuart England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 36 (2005): 374. 36 Colin Burrow, “Life and Work in Shakespeare’s Poems,” Proceedings of the British Academy 97 (1997): 29. 37 Roslyn Lander Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge U. Press, 2001), 49. 38 For a concurring view, see Rickard, “The ‘First’ Folio in Context: The Folio Collections of Shakespeare, Jonson, and King James,” in Meek, Rickard, and Wilson, Shakespeare’s Book, 213. 39 Hugh Craig, “Shakespeare In Print,” Heat 4 (2002): 54–55. 40 Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge U. Press, 1993), 288. 41 Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge U. Press, 1992), 25–26. For a helpful summary of critical narratives centered on authorship, playwriting, and the marketplace, see Michael Saenger, The Commodification of Textual Engagements in the English Renaissance (London: Ashgate, 2006), 28–33. 42 Zachary Lesser, “Playbooks,” The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, vol. 1, ed. Joad Raymond (Oxford U. Press, 2011), 527. 43 See Donaldson, “First Folio,” 199–200, although I strongly disagree with the significance he finds in Digges’s apparent subsequent refusal to call Shakespeare’s plays “works” in a 1640 poem prefacing Benson’s edition of Shakespeare’s poems. 44 Galbraith, “The First Folio, Illustrated,” Williams and Lazzuri, Foliomania!, 2. 45 I quote the text from Hinman but, for ease of reference, the in-text citations from Jonson, Major Works. 46 Jonson’s definition of “work” may be derived from his Timber, or Discoveries, in a passage drawn from Joannes Buchler’s Reformata Poeseos Institutio: see Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 10 vols. (U. of Oxford Press, 1925–52), 11:282. “A poem,” Jonson writes, “is the work of the poet, the end and fruit of his labour and study.” Jonson makes it clear that the “poem” is an end, a finished work: he distinguishes “poem” from “poesy,” which is the poet’s “skill or craft of making.” The poet is “the doer,” poesy “the doing,” and the poem “the thing done.” As Jonson defined the poem as “the work of the poet,” his “work,” by extension, similarly indicates a “thing done” (Major Works, 583). 47 Jonson, Major Works, 539. 48 Donaldson, “First Folio,” 189. 49 The Scornful Ladie (1616), A King and No King (1619), Philaster (1620, 1622).
SHAKESPEARE’S FOLIO 50 I should commit thee surely with thy peeres, And tell, how farre thou didst our Lily out-shine, Or sporting Kid, or Marlowes mighty line. And though thou hadst small Latine and lesse Greeke, From thence to honour thee, I would not seeke For names; but call forth thund’ring Aeschilus, Euripides, and Sophocles to us, Paccuuius, Accius, him of Cordoua [Seneca] dead, To life againe, to hear thy Buskin tread And shake a Stage . . . (lines 28–37) 51 Lyly’s printed plays: Campaste (1584), Sappho and Phao (1584, 1591), Midas (1592), Gallathea (1592), Mother Bombie (1594), The Woman in the Moone (1597), Loues Metamorphosis (1601). Edmund Blount would publish a duodecimo collection, Six Court Comedies, in 1632. In contrast, his prose Euphues and its sequel appeared in at least thirteen editions between 1579 and 1623. 52 Spanish Tragedy is attributed to Kyd in print in Thomas Heywood’s 1612 pamphlet Apology For Actors, but Kyd’s name does not appear on any edition of the play. 53 Hero and Leander was Marlowe’s most reprinted work (five times between 1598 and 1622, all including George Chapman’s continuation). Tamburlaine, a once-popular play, had not been reprinted since 1605, and Massacre at Paris and Dido not since 1594. The Jew of Malta would not be printed until 1633, although it had been entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1594. 54 None of the work of Aeschylus, Euripides, Pacuvis, Accius, Aristophanes, or Plautus had appeared in English print in the seventeenth century. For Seneca, several English editions of single plays were published in the 1560s, and one collected English edition in 1581; English Latin-language editions had appeared in 1589 and 1613. Terence’s work had appeared in quarto editions of Terence in English (1598, 1607, 1614) and several Latin-language editions (1589, 1597, 1611, 1624)
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The Shakespeare Apocrypha and Canonical Expansion in the Marketplace Peter Kirwan
1
I
n March 2010, Brean Hammond’s new edition of Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood was added to the ongoing third series of the Arden Shakespeare, prompting a barrage of criticism in the academic press and the popular media.1 Responses to the play, which may or may not contain the “ghost”2 of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Cardenio, have dealt with two issues: the question of whether Double Falsehood is or is not a forgery;3 and if the latter, the question of how much of it is by Shakespeare. This second question as a criterion for canonical inclusion is my starting point for this paper, as scholars and critics have struggled to define clearly the boundaries of, and qualifications for, canonicity. James Naughtie, in a BBC radio interview with Hammond to mark the edition’s launch, suggested that a new attribution would only be of interest if he had “a big hand, not just was one of the people helping to throw something together for a Friday night.”4 Naughtie’s comment points us toward an important, unqualified aspect of the canonical problem—how big does a contribution by Shakespeare need to be to qualify as “Shakespeare”? The act of inclusion in an edited Complete Works popularly enacts the “canonization” of a work, fixing an attribution in print and commodifying it within a saleable context. To a very real extent, “Shakespeare” is defined as what can be sold as Shakespearean. Yet while canonization operates at its most fundamental as a selection/exclusion binary, collaboration complicates the issue. Timon of Athens, for example, is now sold as a Shakespeare/ Middleton collaboration in the collected works of both Shakespeare and Middleton; and, more controversially, the Oxford Middleton has also canonized Macbeth and Measure for Measure as collaborative plays within a second author’s canon.5 There is still an implicit concern for collaboration 247
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sullying the product, whose value is derived from its fixity, its “Complete”ness. Responding to the Arden decision, commentator Ron Rosenbaum fumed that “a respected edition of Shakespeare self-destructively tries to ‘extend the brand,’” and that Double Falsehood’s publication represented a “triumph of marketing over art.”6 In Rosenbaum’s piece, the question of authenticity is subordinate to the question of canonical integrity as informed by quality. A smaller, more prestige product is preferable to apparently boundless and unregulated extension. This has a parallel in Stanley Wells’s justification for the exclusion of Edward III from the first edition of the Oxford Shakespeare (1986): “From the publisher’s point of view, any edition of The Complete Works has to compete financially with the many other available editions of The Complete Works; adding yet another early history play [Edward III] to the several early history plays which usually go unread in existing editions will add to the bulk and cost of the edition without necessarily adding to its attractiveness.”7 In Wells’s justification, the marketplace tends towards homogeneity, prioritizing a single paradigm of authorship (the identification of the authorial hand)8 that supports the volume’s authorizing agency, William Shakespeare. The title of a Complete Works is another publishing requirement, and one that only developed alongside the growing widespread dissemination of Shakespeare in the nineteenth century.9 Completeness demands finality, closure, the imposition of absolute distinctions between “Shakespeare” and “not-Shakespeare,” canon versus the plays traditionally known as the “Shakespeare Apocrypha.”10 That Edward III was included in the second edition of the Oxford Shakespeare in 2005, and Double Falsehood in the third series of the Arden in 2010, is symptomatic of a shift, however. The preference for exclusion that informed Oxford’s original decision has been overtaken by a consumerbased demand for value for money, and market attractiveness is determined by quantity of constitution. This is most evident in the decision of several editions since the Riverside Shakespeare to include Hand D’s fragment of Thomas More, moving towards consumption of the Author, even at the expense of rendering the play itself incomplete. As Jeffrey Masten argues: “Wanting More in these editions is linked to our desire for more and more Shakespeare; thus the seemingly escalating race to add to our volumes: more Lear in the Oxford and still more in the Norton; the “Funeral Elegy”; the arrival of The Two Noble Kinsmen in the updated fourth edition of Bevington’s Longman edition; Edward III in the second edition of the Riverside, and so on.”11 This practice was continued more recently by the RSC Shakespeare, which added “To the Queen” to the print edition, and scenes from Edward III and Arden of Faversham to its website, safeguarding against the possibility of omitting any of Shakespeare’s words from a Complete Works.12
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In a market that favors novelty, the neglected plays of the Apocrypha have become increasingly important in the push to enhance the market value of a Complete Works. Thomas More, Edward III, Arden of Faversham and Double Falsehood are impinging on the fixed canon and throwing into question what is considered to be, and may be sold as, “Shakespearean”—whether an individual scene he wrote, a play to which he contributed, or a play adapted from one he may have written. Arden has incorporated Thomas More as well as Double Falsehood; Edward III is available in the New Cambridge Shakespeare and will shortly be published in a new edition by Arden; and the “quarrel scene” of Arden of Faversham appears in an edited extract on the website of the RSC Shakespeare.13 By embracing these multiple paradigms of authorship under the aegis of Shakespeare, the integrity of the individual author as boundary for the canon is further threatened by the existence of collaborative and socially situated Shakespearean extracts that, nonetheless, are still employed in order to expand the canon of a single authorial agent. Yet the historical precedent for this use of the disputed plays points us towards the initial lack of fixity in the constitution of the canon that preceded attempts to commodify and limit Shakespeare. Sonia Massai has recently reminded us of the importance of looking beyond the obvious and oft-rehearsed editorial history of Shakespeare in order to better appreciate the multiple agencies that have governed the construction of the established text. She notes how the Oxford editors, for example, “describe the cumulative effect of the changes introduced in the First Folio as a consistent progression towards ideological, as well as textual, uniformity.”14 The consolidation of canon is an important aspect of this, and attempts to justify the inclusions and exclusions of the folio in light of later authorship research have been inflected by a bias towards continuity. Yet the folio was only the most influential among a series of publishing and bibliographic moments that attempted to negotiate the constitution of “Shakespeare.” This essay will argue that Shakespeare and the Shakespeare canon have always been defined by the ongoing opposition of commercial and cultural/aesthetic interests, by returning to the period of Double Falsehood’s initial publication, during which the canon vacillated between two major forms: one containing thirty-six plays, the other forty-three. The mobility of the canon during this period demonstrates the desire for more Shakespeare during the early years of Shakespeare’s canonization, showing that movements towards canonical homogeneity have always been in conflict with reader-generated impulses towards canonical expansion and plurality.15 The Shakespeare that is for sale sits at the site of contested conceptions of what can and should be considered “Shakespeare.”
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2 In 1663, Philip Chetwind published the third folio of Shakespeare’s plays, the first anthology of Shakespeare in just over thirty years. This edition marked an important reclamation of Shakespeare’s status in the immediate postwar period dominated by the Fletcher and Jonson canons.16 It filled a commercial gap in the market and reasserted the worth of Shakespeare’s works, at a time when he was often derided as an “ignorant and archaic rustic.”17 It also promoted the theater itself, reoffering the plays in a prestige folio format designed to lend credibility to the newly revived stage.18 Chetwind acquired the rights to Shakespeare’s plays through inheritance, marrying the widow of Robert Allot who had acquired the stake previously owned by Edward Blount.19 His 1663 edition closely followed the 1632 folio; but the second impression, published in the following year, marked the first attempt to alter the constitution of the canon as established by the 1623 folio. The title page of the second imprint reads as follows: Mr. William Shakespear’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies. Published according to the true Original Copies. The third Impression. And unto this Impression is added seven Playes, never before Printed in Folio. viz. Pericles Prince of Tyre. The London Prodigall. The History of Thomas Ld. Cromwell. Sir John Oldcastle Lord Cobham. The Puritan Widow. A York-shire Tragedy. The Tragedy of Locrine. [device] London, Printed for P.C. 1664.
The retrospective authority granted to the 1623 folio has anachronistically diminished our sense of the impact of this edition on the burgeoning Shakespeare canon. John Jowett notes of the additions that “all were seen as having some claim to be of Shakespeare’s authorship, but in most cases the claim was weak,” a statement that projects contemporary valuations of authorial claims onto the past using the past tense.20 The claims of most of the additional plays are now weak, according to modern priorities of individual authorship, but in bibliographic terms, most of the additions had solid claims, better documented than those of several 1623 folio plays. There are no records of any attempt to collect Shakespeare’s works within his own lifetime in order to consolidate a canon, although critics such as Lukas Erne have attempted to argue that such a project may have begun before his death, a speculation that fulfills a critical desire but is unlikely to be proven.21 In the absence of an authorized canon, therefore, we must turn to the book market. Erne’s groundbreaking work has forced critical reassessment of Shakespeare’s popularity in print, noting that Shakespeare appeared in no fewer than forty-five editions between 1584–1616, twice as many as Heywood, the second most-printed dramatist of this period.22 The number of editions and the number of reprints, Erne argues, indicate
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respectively the scale of investment and of sales. We must therefore not underestimate the extent of Shakespeare’s material print presence on London bookshelves. A committed Shakespeare bibliophile collecting all the books attributed on title pages to the author within his lifetime could have gathered a library of quartos and octavos consisting of all of the following: Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598), Richard II (1598), Richard III (1598), 1 Henry IV (1599), The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), 2 Henry IV (1600), The Merchant of Venice (1600), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600), Much Ado about Nothing (1600), The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602), Hamlet (1603), The London Prodigal (1605), King Lear (1608), A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608), Pericles (1609), Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609), and Troilus and Cressida (1609).23 To these seventeen books may be added Locrine (1595), Thomas Lord Cromwell (1602), The Puritan (1607), and The Troublesome Reign of King John (1611), if readers interpreted the initials “W. S.” and “W. Sh.” as Shakespeare’s; and Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, which include Shakespeare’s name within the books, although not on their title pages. Several other plays would not appear in print until the 1623 folio. From the point of view of the London literary marketplace, then, the claims of several plays added to the 1664 folio were no less weak than those of their shelf-fellows, since they derived from the presses of reputable printers and shared similar strategies of title-page authentication. Physically, they belonged indisputably to “Shakespeare” insofar as “Shakespeare” functioned as their principal authorizing agent. Whether the intention behind the attributions was deliberately misleading or points to a Shakespearean involvement of a different nature is, from a commercial point of view, immaterial. It is important to recognise here the dispersal of Shakespearean literary identity across poems and plays associated with a range of patrons, companies, genres and stationers. It was the individual buyer and reader of books, rather than the printer, who determined the constitution of their own Shakespearean canon during the author’s lifetime.24 It was with the 1623 folio that a bookseller, in conjunction with the King’s Men as the most important authorizing agent for the plays, took responsibility for shaping Shakespeare’s theatrical canon into a single material entity. This involved excluding formerly “authorized” works, authorizing others hitherto anonymous and introducing previously unavailable plays. In 1619, however, Thomas Pavier had begun a similar project that, while unfulfilled, demonstrates the importance of the bibliographical attribution to Shakespeare in creating a cumulative sense of the work. Pavier’s collection, usually considered unauthorized, included The Whole Contention, Henry V, The Merry Wives of Windsor, King Lear, Pericles, A Yorkshire
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Tragedy, Sir John Oldcastle, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Merchant of Venice.25 This apparent first attempt to create a collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays (evidenced by the continuous signatures linking Contention and Pericles) represents an intriguing cross-section of texts, connected for the most part simply by Pavier’s right to publish them. Just four years shy of the 1623 folio, then, Pavier’s project is evidence of the inherent instability of the Shakespeare authorial corpus in print, despite his apparent desire to stabilize that corpus. Objective assessments of authorial contribution are secondary to practical concerns of ownership, prior attribution, and marketability: for example, Pericles was a top seller with three quartos already printed, Falstaff/Oldcastle was the star of the perennially popular Henry IV plays, and the story of the Calverley murders underpinning A Yorkshire Tragedy was a contemporary sensation. For Pavier, the Shakespeare attribution does not appear to have been a matter of simple forgery, as later critics assuming an inherent value in Shakespeare’s name have suggested.26 Rather, Shakespeare acts as a convenient marketing principle by which to set out a larger project: it provides the organizational framework to reproduce plays which are expected to sell on their own merits. Pavier’s project is as much about using popular plays to create Shakespeare as it is about using Shakespeare to make plays popular.27 Pavier’s project was undermined by the success of the 1623 folio project. The infamous “stolne, and surreptitious copies” of Heminge and Condell’s preface28 have been taken to refer both to the so-called “bad” quartos of previous publications and/or specifically to the Pavier quartos, half of which were substantially variant versions of folio texts.29 Whether intentional or not, the exclusion of several plays already attributed to Shakespeare from the 1623 folio was compounded by their association with the Pavier project and the imputations of corrupt and/or badly printed texts that the folio made, providing a foundation for the critical degradation of the Apocrypha. Not only omitted from the canon, they are associated with unsatisfactory states of textual production. As Laurie Maguire puts it, “Heminge and Condell did not give us Shakespeare; they gave us all that we call Shakespeare.”30 We cannot know for certain what prompted Chetwind to readmit seven plays to the Shakespearean corpus in 1664, though we can make some inferences. G. R. Proudfoot and Eric Rasmussen have suggested that the printings of Pericles in 1633 and The Two Noble Kinsmen in 1634 were deliberately intended as supplements to the 1632 Shakespeare folio, suggesting that the canon presented by the 1623 folio was already available for challenge and extension.31 As I have pointed out elsewhere, a contemporary collection in the library of Charles I offers another alternative informal supplement to the 1632 folio, adding Fair Em, Mucedorus, and The Merry Devil of Edmon-
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ton to a grouping of other dubious plays.32 It is important to note that the 1623 folio preliminaries make no explicit claims for completeness: the title calls the collection “Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies,” while Heminge and Condell speak only of having “collected and published them” without specifying the parameters that define the “works” being gathered. Completeness is implied, but not marketed. The continued appearance of plays such as The Two Noble Kinsmen in close proximity to the publication of a Shakespeare folio suggests that the Shakespeare canon remained, at least in the publishing industry, unfixed. Stephen Orgel argues that the 1664 folio was the first to imply that “more Shakespeare was better Shakespeare,” beginning a move towards comprehensiveness as a marker of value.33 Chetwind’s seven additions gathered together all of the extant plays explicitly attributed to Shakespeare within his own lifetime, thus excluding the posthumously published Kinsmen and The Birth of Merlin (1662).34 Jowett notes additionally that these two plays were both the property of stationers who had no stake in the 1664 folio, which may have practically impacted on their exclusion.35 The exception is the falsely dated Oldcastle, the inclusion of which suggests that Chetwind was relying solely on the physical evidence of earlier title pages rather than possessing any independent knowledge of provenance. He also excluded Troublesome Reign, most likely owing to the presence of another King John already in the folio. Other than on the title page, the seven new additions to the 1664 folio are not explicitly differentiated from the established plays. As with several folio plays, Cymbeline ends with a “Finis” and device, then Pericles follows directly after a blank page. As such, the edition presents them without reservation as Shakespeare’s works, subject to the same frontispiece, commendatory verses and other bibliographic material. However, David Scott Kastan notices a bibliographic anomaly in the pagination of the additions: following Cymbeline, pagination begins again at 1 on the first page of Pericles and runs through to 20, then begins again at 1 for The London Prodigal and runs continuously through the six remaining plays to 100, the last page of Locrine. Kastan refuses to speculate on the reasons for this, merely commenting that “the odd physical structure of the supplement is the only sign of whatever obscure distinction its publisher, Philip Chetwind, intended.”36 Kastan clearly believes that there is a distinction intended, however, and his note that Pericles is the only one of the seven “plausibly thought to be [Shakespeare’s]” suggests an overly optimistic level of critical engagement on Chetwind’s part that would see him differentiate one play over the others based on the strength of its claim. The lack of any other distinguishing marks rather suggests that the pagination reflects compositorial error, or
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else a simple mechanical distinction; that Pericles was obtained earlier than the other six. If Chetwind was inspired by the implied supplement to the 1632 folio offered by the 1633 quarto of Pericles, it is possible that he initially intended to incorporate only this play, before deciding to look for more. However, the shift in pagination does remind us that the disputed plays are already beginning to function as a group, a fourth category following the retained division of “Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies”; the “seven Playes” are gathered as a genre unto themselves. The implications of the additions were far reaching as, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was the usual practice for each new edition to be marked up from its predecessor, meaning that the new plays would be included by default until actively removed by an editor. Thus, the new plays remained in the fourth folio (1685), which in turn was the base text used by Shakespeare’s first modern editor, Nicholas Rowe. Rowe further elided the distinction between the original thirty-six and the new seven by removing the subdivisions of Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, meaning that all the plays follow each other continuously: his sixth volume begins with Antony and Cleopatra and Cymbeline, after which Pericles follows with no bibliographic or material distinction made until the volume closes with Locrine. By including frontispiece illustrations and lists of dramatis personae for all forty-three plays, Rowe further standardized their presentation, merely placing them at the end of the collection rather than marking them as in any way different. Rowe’s silence on this decision is further evidence that their inclusion was passive, an acceptance of the available canon rather than an engaged reevaluation. This passivity was finally countered by Alexander Pope in 1725. Sidney Lee dismisses this as an insignificant period during which “six valueless pieces . . . found for a time unimpeded admission to [the] collected works,”37 but we should not underestimate its importance. On purchasing a 1664 folio, the Bodleian Library sold its copy of the 1623 version as “superfluous,” an instance indicative of the value accorded the new arrangement.38 The forty-three-play canon endured for sixty years, one of the longest sustained periods of canonical stability ever achieved.39 By granting the seven additional plays the authority of the folio format, and extending to them the coverage of the commendatory verses, dedications and frontispiece that contributed to the literary construction of Shakespeare, Chetwind established their ongoing presence in Shakespeare’s textual afterlife. The canon now existed in two separate states, and future compilers were required actively to choose the constitution of their edition rather than simply receiving a single authorized version.40 Gary Taylor
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remarks of the additions that they “reinforced the impression that his lifework was a mess, a collection of ‘indigested’ plays that mixed genius and ineptitude haphazardly,” thus linking the extended canon to the relatively haphazard Restoration treatment of Shakespeare.41 The apparently passive acceptance of the additions, Taylor implies, is symptomatic of a casual attitude to the works during this period. Even in a growing climate of Bardolatry, it would take a figure as confident and intellectually independent as Pope to offer a challenge to the forty-three-play canon and reevaluate the constitution of the Shakespearean corpus. The forty-three-play canon gained considerable traction, and there is evidence that some of the apocryphal plays enjoyed a measure of popularity in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Pericles was one of the first plays revived on stage when the theaters reopened after the Interregnum, appearing at the Cockpit, Drury Lane, in the 1659–60 season, and revived in the eighteenth century as Marina.42 The Puritan was revived in the 1660s, and Matthew Draper’s The Spendthrift, a loose adaptation of The London Prodigal, was first published in 1731. These later revivals occurred not long after Tonson had reissued Pope’s edition in duodecimo, with a ninth volume including reprints of the 1664 additions, thus reviving the forty-three-play canon even under Pope’s aegis. Although Theobald’s 1733 edition of Shakespeare’s works followed Pope’s 1725 edition in returning to the canon of the 1623 folio, the forty-three-play canon would emerge one final time. In 1734, the independent publisher Robert Walker began publishing inexpensive individual editions of Shakespeare’s plays containing just the text. In doing so, he challenged the monopoly of the Tonson cartel (publishers of Rowe, Pope, and Theobald) over the works of Shakespeare. Murphy notes that Tonson first tried to combat the publication with legal action and then retaliated with his own cheap editions, which resulted in the marketplace being flooded with affordable volumes of Shakespeare.43 During this commercial battle, efforts to outstrip the other led to both Walker and Tonson publishing the majority of the 1664 additions in new individual editions. Jowett notes that three of these (Oldcastle, Cromwell, and Prodigal) sold sufficiently well to warrant reprints.44 As Shakespeare’s plays entered mass circulation through these inexpensive printings, so too did the apocryphal plays, and Tonson and Walker both appear to have anticipated a readership for them. The single editions, which Edmund King points out were “authorised” by the publishers rather than the editors, formed a major part of the ongoing public dispute between the two publishers.45 Appended “Advertisements” allowed the publishers to attack one another’s authority,
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particularly over the question of King Lear. Tonson accuses Walker of stupidity in printing Tate’s Lear rather than Shakespeare’s.46 Walker retaliates in the Advertisement to his own Locrine, printing “A Specimen of some of Tonson’s Omissions and Blunders in the Tragedy of King Lear, which render the same useless and unintelligible.” Walker appeals to the authority of the stage, claiming that his version is printed “as it has been acted for near 50 Years last past (tho’ Tonson’s spurious Edition kills him on the stage).”47 His inclusion of Elizabeth Barry’s Epilogue and Tate’s dedicatory materials is cited as further evidence of authenticity. The explicit debates over authenticity conducted in the paratexts of playbooks that are themselves of doubtful authorship draws attention to the role of the publisher in determining canonical constitution, and to the fact that the “authentic” Shakespeare at this time was a multifaceted construction, a result of theatrical adaptations and publishers’ interests. Walker consolidated his endeavor by issuing volume titles, allowing readers to bind their own seven-volume collection of his editions.48 Walker’s collected edition is omitted from most accounts of the publishing history of Shakespeare’s works on account of it being “pirated”: it was produced outside the linear Tonson-run monopoly and reprinted previously available texts, rather than actively editing them. However, despite its questionable merits, it was a commercial edition of Shakespeare and therefore deserves consideration: for the contemporary reader, the edition was no less authentic than the myriad popular editions that can be found on modern bookshelves; and the fact that Tonson countered with an eight-volume reprint of the canon including the disputed plays (in the eighth volume) in the same year is indicative of its perceived importance. Walker’s is the first edition that desegregates the disputed plays, mixing them in with the canonical plays, and its order is unique in Shakespeare publishing history. The effect is to place equal authority on all forty-three plays. The contents are as follows: Vol. 1: Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Richard III, Thomas Lord Cromwell, Tempest, Merry Wives; Vol. 2: Macbeth, Othello, 1 Henry IV, Titus, Measure for Measure, London Prodigal; Vol. 3: Antony & Cleopatra, Pericles, Lear, 2 Henry IV, The Puritan, Two Gentlemen of Verona; Vol. 4: Sir John Oldcastle, Locrine, Henry V, Timon of Athens, Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Vol. 5: 1, 2, and 3 Henry VI, Henry VIII, As You Like It, Merchant of Venice; Vol. 6: King John, Troilus & Cressida, Richard II, Romeo & Juliet, Taming of the Shrew, Love’s Labour’s Lost;
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This ordering is inconsistent with any modern criteria for arranging the plays, and it is fair to assume that it is dictated by practical rather than critical considerations. By chance or design, however, it presents to us a very different canon. We are used to seeing plays either in the rough generic groupings provided by the 1623 folio, or in chronological order, both of which are questionable.49 The random order here throws assumptions into question and causes us to consider the plays in a different way. An imaginative reading of the plays in the order presented, assuming design in the organization, offers interesting interpretative possibilities. The juxtaposition of plays highlights themes and links that alter the reader’s perception of them. Thus, Thomas Lord Cromwell comes positioned in a run of plays dealing with usurpation and the fall of great men. Gardiner’s plots, hatched in his study, seem even more Machiavellian in the light of Richard III and Cassius, and set the tone for the atmosphere of political treachery in the following The Tempest. The consecutive placing of Measure for Measure and The London Prodigal brings out close dramatic links between the two: the city setting, the disguised authority figure (Duke/Father) secretly overseeing lapses in morality, the virtuous maid more interested in God’s love than man’s. Following Measure for Measure’s concern with chastity and marriage, the central scene of The London Prodigal becomes exceptionally shocking, as Luce’s forced marriage and subsequent honorable conduct causes the near total destruction of her life, thus further dramatizing the trials facing an honest woman. Continuing with this reading, the hypothetical reader is uplifted by the happy chances of Pericles that bring reunification and peace, expecting the same as the next play, King Lear, draws to its close; and in this is satisfied, for Walker chooses to print Nahum Tate’s adaptation of King Lear with its happy ending. The connection between the two is strengthened physically through Walker’s placement of the “Specimen of Tonson’s Omissions” prior to Pericles.50 These two plays in juxtaposition present a Shakespeare concerned with family and amenable to eighteenth-century sensibilities in the reiterated reunions of fathers and daughters. In this vein, the reader then proceeds to 2 Henry IV and finds something more approaching tragedy in the rejection of Falstaff, here separated from the history plays that provide it with context. 2 Henry IV concludes, however, with its epilogue reminding the reader that “Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man”; and sure enough, The First Part of Sir John Oldcastle follows at the start of the next volume, preceding Henry V, as if to support the dramatist’s claim and pres-
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ent the real Oldcastle with due respect. Finally, the placement of Yorkshire Tragedy immediately following Cymbeline places in parallel two instances of a husband attempting to kill a wife; disaster is happily averted in ancient Britain, but no gods descend to save the children of the more contemporary marriage. This reading is, of course, merely one conjecture of what a reader’s experience could have been, but is designed to show the potential impact of Walker’s integration of the disputed plays into the body of the canon. This is a different canon, a different Shakespeare, with patterns of cause, effect, and resonance shaped by the inclusion and integration of the Apocrypha. Read among the authorized plays, rather than separately from them, the plays influence the reader’s perception of Shakespeare, showing the dramatist building on themes explored in other plays and responding to his own work, with each play affecting the sense of the author at work. As the cultural figure of Shakespeare was constructed, this was the danger posed by the disputed plays: they had the potential to change the way Shakespeare was read and deciphered. Once dissociated from the canon by Pope and Theobald, then, it was imperative that the Apocrypha be hidden. Walker’s treatment of the plays was the last time they were seen in print until Malone’s Supplement of 1780.
3 Alexander Pope’s edition of 1723–25 is indicative of the change in Shakespeare’s status and reputation that took place during the years since Rowe’s edition. Commercially unsuccessful but critically influential, Pope was both the instigator and the most extreme example of the Bardolatrous attitude towards Shakespeare in eighteenth-century editorial practice.51 His approach to the plays is governed by subjective aesthetic judgments, which lead him to make decisions that have been critically derided by subsequent generations as he makes the plays “comfortably fit for 18th century habitation.”52 Of these, the most significant are his regularization of meter, relegation of passages he considers less pleasing to footnotes (suggesting that they are spurious interpolations by actors), and his removal of the seven 1664 additions, thus disrupting the inherited lineage of the forty-three-play canon. Edmund King argues that Pope’s “criterion for canonical inclusion is clearly not the authenticity (in the modern sense) of a work, but whether that work adds to its author’s reputation”; that is, that canonicity should be selective rather than objectively comprehensive.53 Pope’s Preface makes apology for those aspects of the plays that are judged deficient, in a bid
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to create and preserve Shakespeare’s reputation. Pope thus exercises unprecedented editorial control in constructing his own Shakespeare, a Shakespeare with impeccable literary taste and a thoroughly contemporary mastery of the poetic arts. In so doing, less desirable elements are removed or diminished. Some weaker passages are justified as being Shakespeare’s concessions to “the meaner sort of people” who made up seventeenthcentury audiences (though “even in these, our Author’s Wit . . . is born above his subject”).54 Pope’s Preface is essentially anti-theatrical: he sees a literary genius spoiled by the necessity of pandering to popular taste, and actors as complicit in the ruining of the works. Robert Weimann traces this back to the self-consciously literary attitudes of early dramatists such as Jonson: “Editors [of the eighteenth century] almost unanimously agreed on the need to guard Shakespeare’s text from the ill customs of the age and especially from those of the players.”55 Despite recognizing that Shakespeare was also a player, Pope expresses the wish that the author had undertaken to publish his plays himself, in order that “we might be certain which [plays] are genuine” and find “the errors lessened by some thousands.”56 King notes that a “belief in the inherently corrupting power of playhouse manuscript practices” licensed eighteenth-century editors to remake Shakespeare as they saw fit.57 Pope sees himself as salvaging what remains of Shakespeare after lesser minds have tampered with the works, and therefore his approach is confident and absolutist. He believes that Shakespeare’s hand can be identified by “the distinguishing marks of his style, and his manner of thinking and writing,”58 effectively suggesting that he, Pope, has a unique insight into the workings of Shakespeare’s mind.59 On this basis, he declares that “those wretched plays,” the seven additions, “cannot be admitted as his.”60 The emotive language stigmatizes the plays in terms of their quality, but also evokes images of textual orphans, forsaken and worthless texts that are audacious in begging admittance, an association that would stick. Continuing with his merciless critique of the canon, he also conjectures that Shakespeare’s hand is only lightly present in Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Winter’s Tale, The Comedy of Errors, and Titus Andronicus.61 It is the theater, and Shakespeare’s hypothesized role in it, that authorizes Pope’s intervention. He explains away the 1664 additions as anonymous contributions to Shakespeare’s company, “fitted up for the theatre while it was under his administration,” and therefore attributed to him in his role as the company’s resident dramatist.62 Tellingly, Pope compares this to the practice of giving “strays to the Lord of the Manor”: Shakespeare becomes part of the landed gentry, a man of wealth and power with the resources to
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be charitable. Authorship, in Pope’s view, is ideally an individual activity, and ideas of company ownership and collective or collaborative authorship have no place in discussing individual and personal genius. This recasts Shakespeare in a mold suited to Pope’s personal approach: as Simon Jarvis notes, the implication is that “the fittest guardian of Shakespeare’s text, like the ideal poet, will not be a professional of any kind, but a self-sufficient man of the world.”63 Pope’s intent, then, is to separate Shakespeare’s public and private lives, his work and his Works: If we give into this opinion [that the plays are corrupted by players and editors], how many low and vicious parts and passages might no longer reflect upon this great Genius, but appear unworthily charged upon him? And even in those which are really his, how many faults may have been unjustly laid to his account from arbitrary additions, expunctions, transpositions of scenes and lines, confusion of characters and persons, wrong application of speeches, corruptions of innumerable passages by the ignorance, and wrong corrections of ’em again by the impertinence, of his first editors? From one or other of these considerations, I am verily persuaded, that the greatest and grossest part of what are thought his errors would vanish, and leave his character in a light very different from that disadvantageous one, in which it now appears to us.64
It is Shakespeare’s “character” that is at stake. Pope’s stance is based on a fundamental textual pessimism and the belief that Shakespeare’s “Genius” could not have been responsible for what Pope considers “errors” within the texts. Pope’s particular dispute continues to be with actors; it is to the “ignorance of the Players” that he attributes the worst of the corruptions.65 This attitude is perhaps anachronistically informed by Pope’s own time. The vogue for adaptation in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was keeping “original” Shakespeare off the stage, just as the emerging editorial tradition attempted to retrieve something closer to Shakespeare’s original hand, as realized in Tonson and Walker’s dispute over Lear. Pope, the poet, sets himself against the theatrical fashions of the time, preferring the unity of a single creative mind.66 Commendably, in terms of editorial integrity, Pope acts on his beliefs by applying his theories of corruption to the texts as edited, hence the relegation to footnotes of “spurious” passages in the canonical plays and the removal of the seven apocryphal plays, dismissed on aesthetic grounds. However, his principles were undercut in the 1728 duodecimo reprint issued by Tonson. This edition resurrects the “wretched plays” by including them as the ninth volume of ten. Orgel theorizes that their reappearance was thanks to “Tonson’s conviction that more Shakespeare would sell more copies, and in the hope that some purchasers of the Complete Shakespeare might be willing to replace it with a More Complete Shakespeare,” in the same vein as the poems, similarly treated as supplemental during this pe-
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riod.67 Jowett suggests that this edition was “probably issued without Pope’s involvement,”68 though this is certainly not true of the edition as a whole: the Preface is revised, and Murphy notes that the edition incorporates many corrections occasioned by Lewis Theobald’s 1726 Shakespear Restor’d.69 Whether or not Pope had a say in the addition of the ninth volume is, from the perspective of a reader, irrelevant: the seven plays are, by their silent inclusion, presented without qualification as authentic. Despite the fact that Pope was the first editor of a Complete Works in over sixty years expressly to deny the authenticity of the plays, and despite the continued appearance of this denial in the 1728 preface, the publisher continues to authenticate them via their inclusion. For editors to debate and devalue elements of the canon is one thing, but for publishers actually to remove them from view is quite another.70 Jowett argues that “over the course of half a century and more [the 1664 additions] must have become embedded in many readers’ sense of what constituted Shakespeare.”71 If this is the case, then the implication is that the commercial imperative overrides the critical, prompting the devaluation of the editorial front matter by the appending of a volume that contradicts the edition’s ethos. Publishers cater to the demands of a reading public that wants to see the Shakespeare with which it is familiar. This pattern is replicated throughout the history of editing Shakespeare, where published editions of complete works as often reflect popular and commercial conceptions of the canon as they do contemporary critical thought: here, as with Pope’s 1728 edition, the commercial need for “completeness” in relation to competing editions overrides the immediate editorial concern. It takes time to break down a canon presented as a unified entity. Although textual historians identify Pope as the key agent in removing the apocryphal plays from collected editions of Shakespeare, it was in fact Lewis Theobald’s 1733 edition that enacted their lasting removal. This is particularly interesting as it contradicts Theobald’s own statement regarding them: he tantalizingly informs the reader, “I can, beyond all controversy, prove some touches in every one of them to come from his pen.”72 The position of the 1728 edition has been completely reversed: where Pope denied the plays’ authenticity and yet included them, Theobald supports their (at least partial) authenticity, yet excludes them. Theobald’s lack of elaboration on this matter is frustrating, as this marks a turning point in the history of the Apocrypha, the point in the editorial chain at which the plays are most influentially banished. The fact that Theobald is ostensibly a supporter of the plays’ partial authenticity implies that the reasons for their removal are motivated by other concerns. King, following Peter Seary’s assertion
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that Theobald may have had no say in the extent of his edition, argues that Tonson would have dictated the constitution of Theobald’s edition.73 However, Tonson’s choice to publish the seven additions in 1728, and again in 1734–35, rather suggests that Tonson took every opportunity to publish the apocryphal plays. It remains likely, therefore, that Theobald was at least partially responsible for their exclusion. The feud over Double Falsehood offers what is perhaps the most plausible explanation. In 1726, Theobald published Shakespeare Restor’d, an intelligent but often pedantic criticism of the errors in Pope’s edition of Shakespeare. The very title, positioning Theobald as Shakespeare’s savior, can be read as an attack on Pope’s scholarship, an attack that Pope took personally. The feud was intensified shortly after by the appearance of Theobald’s play Double Falsehood, first performed and published in 1728. While there is now a greater critical willingness to accept the possibility of the play preserving something of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Cardenio, Theobald’s contemporaries were skeptical of the attribution, giving Pope the opportunity to publicly humiliate Theobald. In the Preface to the first edition of Double Falsehood, Theobald addresses the most obvious objections to Shakespeare’s authorship and dismisses all other complaints as “far from deserving any answer.” However, he also admits that his own “partiality . . . makes me wish, that every thing which is good, or pleasing, in our tongue, had been owing to his pen.”74 This admission of Bardolatrous sentiment is indicative of Theobald’s preemptive eagerness to associate Shakespeare and poetic quality wherever possible. The second edition, also 1728, extends the claims. “I had once designed a Dissertation to prove this play to be of Shakespeare’s writing, from some of its remarkable peculiarities in the language, and nature of the thoughts: but as I could not be sure but that the Play might be attacked, I found it advisable, upon second consideration, to reserve that part to my defence.”75 He goes on to announce that he has begun work on a new “corrected” edition of Shakespeare’s plays (again implicitly criticizing Pope’s edition). He anticipates that his edition “may furnish an occasion for speaking more at large concerning the present play.” Theobald is already taking a defensive position, protecting his intellectual property. His protestations are often suspicious: he apparently has proofs of the authenticity of Double Falsehood and of the 1664 additions, as well as no fewer than three manuscripts, yet chooses not to make any of them public despite the support these “proofs” would lend to his arguments. A reader could be forgiven for questioning whether these proofs ever indeed existed.76
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The exclusion of Double Falsehood and the 1664 additions from Theobald’s 1733 edition of the complete works is therefore a complex issue. The conflation of two decisions—whether to include the contested plays after Pope’s original decision to omit them, and whether to include a version of Double Falsehood—linked plays of doubtful authorship to one of contested and perhaps fraudulent provenance. Despite the editor’s defense of them, all were equally tainted in their omission. Pope’s 1728 edition gave a precedent for their inclusion that Tonson and/or Theobald decided not to use, and Tonson’s reprinting in 1734–35 demonstrates that he still maintained an active claim to them. We must conclude, then, that the decision to exclude all eight plays was taken deliberately, reverting to the earlier model of the canon based on Pope’s first edition, which itself derived authority from the 1623 folio. The thirty-six-play canon may not be “complete” according to Theobald’s beliefs, but it is undoubtedly safe and thus rescues Theobald’s reputation. Pope had, in 1729, ridiculed Theobald as “Tibbald,” the antihero of The Dunciad, “one who hath been concerned in the Journals, written bad Plays or Poems, and publish’d low Criticisms.” He explicitly mocked Double Falsehood in his footnotes. Valerie Rumbold notes that “[Theobald’s] attribution to Shakespeare prompted widespread ridicule,” and that this therefore provided solid ground for Pope’s attack.77 In the persona of “Scriblerus” he first mocks the shaky ground on which Theobald made his attribution (illegitimate family connections and hearsay), highlights Theobald’s own admission of his partiality for Shakespeare and then goes on to parody the style of Shakespeare Restor’d by mock-correcting various passages from Double Falsehood, using Theobald’s own language against him.78 In Pope’s hands, the play is remade as a site of editorial and textual folly, essentially an acknowledged and recognizable joke. Pope’s criticism thus attacks Theobald not on the grounds of scholarship where Theobald was superior, but on poetic and artistic grounds. Theobald’s admission of “partiality” for Shakespeare, and the general association of the Bard with poetic quality, created an opportunity for Pope, who attacked the quality of Double Falsehood, and thus by implication its authenticity. In effect, Pope (the celebrated poet) accepts Theobald’s criteria but rubbishes the lawyer’s ability to judge according to those criteria. Murphy tells us that Theobald’s reputation was badly damaged by Pope’s attacks.79 It is not only the ongoing controversy over the authenticity of Double Falsehood that warranted its exclusion, but also the undermining of Theobald’s “connoisseurship,” his critical faculty.80 It is only logical, then, that this is reflected in Theobald’s exclusion of the rest of the disputed plays: following Pope’s rejection of them, Theobald appears to have doubted his
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own ability to authenticate them. As King notes, despite Pope’s initiation of a newly “interventionist” form of editing, Theobald chooses to restrict his opinions to his preface and footnotes: what King identifies as “ambivalence” I suggest might be even more strongly understood as editorial insecurity.81 Pope’s “victory” in this dispute thus allowed him to dictate the shape of the Shakespeare canon, and maintain the precedence of the sophisticated literary amateur over the historically oriented, newly professional critic exemplified by Theobald. The forty-three-play canon, then, became a casualty of a burgeoning culture of Bardolatry that, in Pope’s practice, treated aesthetic quality as a form of objective proof and prioritized authorial reputation over textual origins. The plays were excluded, not for being demonstrably un-Shakespearean, but for being subjectively “wretched,” and their exclusion was perpetuated in Theobald’s subsequent edition owing to Theobald’s lack of conviction in countering Pope’s criteria. This was the most significant moment yet in the stigmatizing of the disputed plays, the point at which they were first removed from the canon for being aesthetically deficient according to a Shakespearean standard; yet this standard was determined subjectively by Pope. Pope’s specific role in removing the plays, however, was quickly forgotten. With the disappearance of the plays from collected editions of Shakespeare, the plays fell into critical neglect, and references to them became less frequent. However, volume XC of the periodical The Adventurer (1753) provides a sense of how quickly Pope’s opinion of the plays had become standard.82 The periodical, whose contributors included John Hawkesworth, Samuel Johnson, and other members of the literary elite, followed the example of journals such as The Tatler and The Spectator in purporting to represent and influence contemporary tastes and manners. Volume XC, signed by “Crito,” is specifically concerned with great authors and the wish that “unworthy stains could be blotted from their works.”83 The writer (identified in the ODNB as John Duncombe) describes a dream in which all of the authors whom he considers great line up at a heavenly altar to sacrifice those aspects of their work that warrant purgation, with Aristotle and Longinus overseeing.84 The dream is an opportunity for the writer to describe in detail those aspects of the authors’ canons that he feels unworthy of their name, and dramatically to enact a process of selective canonization that is explicitly concerned, not with truth or textual fidelity, but with lasting fame. Shakespeare’s offering is described thus, and is worth quoting in full:
SHAKESPEARE APOCRYPHA Shakespeare carried to the altar a long string of puns, marked “The Taste of the Age,” a small parcel of bombast, and a pretty large bundle of incorrectness. Notwithstanding the ingenuous air with which he made this offering, some officiates at the altar accused him of concealing certain pieces, and mentioned The London Prodigal, Sir Thomas Cromwell, The Yorkshire Tragedy, &c. The poet replied, “that as those pieces were unworthy to be preserved, he should see them consumed to ashes with great pleasure; but that he was wholly innocent of their original.” The two chief priests interposed in this dispute, and dismissed the poet with many compliments; Longinus observing, that the pieces in question could not possibly be his, for that the failings of Shakespeare were like those of Homer, “whose genius, whenever it subsided, might be compared to the ebbing of the ocean, which left a mark upon its shores, to shew to what a height it was sometimes carried.” Aristotle concurred in this opinion, and added “that although Shakespeare was quite ignorant of that exact economy of the stage, which is so remarkable in the Greek writers, yet the meer strength of his genius had in many points carried him infinitely beyond them.85
Developing Pope’s concern with posthumously preserving authorial reputation through selectivity, here Shakespeare becomes the instigator of a process of self-canonization, a poet concerned above all with establishing an impeccable canon for posterity. It is significant that Shakespeare himself is evoked to refute his hand in the disputed plays. A stage tradition throughout the early eighteenth century had seen Shakespeare frequently appearing to provide prologues to performances of his works, thereby acting as an authorizing agent.86 This was especially important in a culture where plays were usually adapted: Shakespeare was invoked in order to legitimize the contemporary reworkings that replaced his originals. Here, Shakespeare’s presence provides the most powerful possible refutation of the authenticity of the disputed plays, drawing a line under the entire argument. The pieces are denounced as unworthy, with Longinus suggesting that even “bad” Shakespeare has an echo of his genius, while these plays are so bereft of merit that they bear no resemblance whatsoever. Aristotle, meanwhile, makes apology for Shakespeare’s “nature,” his lack of adherence to the classical unities and the ancient constructs of theater. This is countered through praise of his natural genius, producing great works despite what Aristotle terms as Shakespeare’s “ignorance.” In some respects, this essay marks the end of the Apocrypha’s commercial profile. The Tonson cartel had not included the plays in a collected edition since that of Pope, now twenty-five years old, and the cheap 1734 individual editions were effectively disposable. Walker’s collected edition does not seem to have achieved widespread circulation, unable to compete with the Tonson machine that had already supplanted earlier editions with Warburton’s new text in 1743, and is absent from accounts of Shakespeare’s textual history. As the plays disappeared from the public eye, The Adventurer chose to mark the moment by resurrecting Shakespeare himself in order finally to disown them at a sacrificial altar.
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If the formal disowning of the Apocrypha was the final step in cementing Shakespeare’s reputation, we may perhaps understand why Samuel Johnson (who one might well expect to have had an opinion on the disputed plays) made no mention of them whatsoever in his 1765 edition.87 Instead, in his notes on The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Johnson echoes Longinus. “If [Two Gentlemen] be taken from him, to whom shall it be given? This question may be asked of all the disputed plays, except Titus Andronicus; and it will be found more credible, that Shakespeare might sometimes sink below his highest flights, than that any other should rise up to his lowest.”88 As in The Adventurer, Shakespeare’s unique genius is assumed to be discernible even in his weakest plays, setting him apart from his contemporaries. While Johnson acknowledges that Shakespeare might “sometimes sink,” there is still an implied base level of quality below which Shakespeare does not descend, and to which no other writers rise. Plays that do not meet this standard are, therefore, not Shakespeare’s. Duncombe’s “sacrifice” of the Apocrypha is made complete in Johnson’s silence on the plays: for Johnson, they no longer exist. It is the assertion of “genius,” of direct inspiration, of Shakespeare’s person and will that decisively resolves the problem of canonical constitution. In a juridical and religiously inflected classical ceremony, Shakespeare proclaims himself “innocent” of the apocrypha; as, too, he is “ignorant” of the niceties of the eighteenth-century age that seeks to canonize him. It is the “mere strength of his genius” that prevails, that prevents the production of works that are “unworthy.” Shakespeare’s self-regulation became orthodox: Edward Capell, who believed in the authenticity of the plays, and even extended authorship claims further with his edition of Edward III,89 was content to accept that Shakespeare himself chose not to include these plays in his own collected edition. The stage was set for Shakespeare’s apotheosis in David Garrick’s 1769 Jubilee,90 and the idea that Shakespeare was himself involved in the compilation of the First Folio has since been sustained, as in Erne.91 By the time Edmund Malone came to edit the plays in 1780—in the form of a Supplement to George Steevens’s edition—the core distinction between a canon and an apocrypha had been set, although it would not be formalized until C. F. Tucker Brooke’s seminal edition of The Shakespeare Apocrypha in 1908.92 All of the plays had commercial value; but the canonical would now be those that Shakespeare would have wanted to be considered his.
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4 While a modern, historically inflected study inevitably returns to the 1623 folio to establish the basic Shakespeare canon, the purpose of rehearsing this history is to point out that the canon was settled much later, and in opposition to a popular and commercially successful model of Shakespeare that has always sought to extend the ways in which we define and read the plays. As such, the outrage expressed against Arden’s Double Falsehood by Rosenbaum and others can be understood as a recurrence of the conflict that oscillated between Chetwind and Pope, Walker and The Adventurer, which represents the collision of commercial and cultural capital, Shakespeare as popular author responsive to the demands of readers versus Shakespeare as prestigious cultural icon. It is over the plays of the apocrypha that this conflict was and continues to be most urgently fought; their inclusion alerts us to the wider commercial context of Shakespeare’s writing, both in the theater and the early book trade; while their exclusion speaks to the maintenance of the canon as single artistic oeuvre. These remain the two conflicting priorities underpinning the canon debates. C. F. Tucker Brooke’s consolidation of the category of Apocrypha in 1908—the first volume to refer to the group by that name—was the culmination of a long line of varied and inconsistent collections of disputed plays, and acted to resolve these disputes.93 By creating a boundaried dumping ground for plays of dubious origin, he created a space in which the messy context of Shakespeare’s early multiplicity in printed form and collaboration could be safely discussed, while preserving the boundaries of canon. The main canon, by contrast, became a notionally fixed entity identifiable with the individual Author. By abstracting and containing the elements of doubt, Shakespeare’s canon became synonymous with Shakespeare’s corpus, an extension of his embodied presence into material book form. This was accompanied by increasing use in the twentieth-century of the title Complete Works, which resists flexibility; for, if new plays can be added to a complete works, then it was clearly incomplete to begin with. Yet the rationale for completeness is itself commercial, serving consumer demand for a defined and exhaustive product. Rosenbaum’s complaint may justifiably be reversed; in limiting and dissecting the artistic context of Shakespeare’s plays, it is “completeness” that represents the triumph of marketing over art. Scholarship over the last twenty years has destabilized the dichotomy formed by Brooke between canon and apocrypha. Appreciation of the importance of early modern book culture and the theatrical repertory to the creation of Shakespeare’s authorship has insisted on the re-situation of Shakespeare’s plays within their historical context, of which the apocryphal
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plays form a major part; while the acceptance of collaboration within the established canon has disrupted the corporeal, individualized idea of the corpus. Richard Proudfoot has called for the apocryphal category to be replaced with an open-ended “unattributed repertoire” of Shakespeare’s works, while John Jowett prefers a “gradualist model.”94 Neither of these, however, offers a model that can be realized commercially. While the Apocrypha has been theoretically abolished as a category, in practice it persists as the inverse of the marketable product—it is the Shakespeare that cannot be sold. Paradoxically, then, these plays consolidated their association with Shakespeare on the basis of their perceived commercial viability and interest to Shakespeare’s earlier publishers and readers; yet it is the reawakening of interest in their relevance to Shakespeare that now undermines the principles on which Shakespeare is commercially disseminated. Shakespeare’s canon—and drama itself—resists completion, inextricably connected as it is to the collaborative milieu of early modern theater-making. The new willingness of publishers to attach apocryphal plays to Shakespeare’s name may occasion alarm, but it also allows us to reflect usefully on the eclectic and heterogeneous circulation of Shakespeare’s early printed presence. If completeness, and canonical homogeny, restrict Shakespeare according to the anachronistically modern demand for consumption, then new attention to the apocrypha’s historical role in producing Shakespeare for the commercial market, rather than debate over their authorship, may offer the most productive means of reintegrating Shakespeare into his multiple contexts.
University of Nottingham
NOTES 1
Brean Hammond, ed., Double Falsehood (London: Methuen, 2010). The best analysis of the reaction is that of Hammond himself in “After Arden,” The Quest for “Cardenio”: Shakespeare, Fletcher, Cervantes, and the Lost Play, ed. David Carnegie and Gary Taylor (Oxford U. Press, 2012), 62–78.
2
Richard Proudfoot, Shakespeare: Text, Stage and Canon (London: Thomson, 2001), 81.
3
Hammond’s edition makes a strong and prudently qualified case for believing Theobald’s claims based on historical evidence rather than the identification of specific “Shakespearean” passages; the value, in the words of the general editors, is in the possibility of surviving textual evidence for a lost play. The counterargument, that the play is a Theobaldian forgery, is strongly upheld by Tiffany Stern, “‘The Forgery of Some Modern Author’?: Theobald’s Shakespeare and Cardenio’s Double Falsehood,” Shakespeare Quarterly 62 (2011): 555–93.
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Today Programme, BBC Radio 4, 15 March 2010.
5
Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, eds., Thomas Middleton: Collected Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008).
6
Ron Rosenbaum, “The Double Falsehood of Double Falsehood,” The Spectator, May 13, 2010.
7
Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, “The Oxford Shakespeare Re-viewed by the General Editors,” Analytical & Enumerative Bibliography 4 (1990): 18.
8
As Scott McMillin, The Elizabethan Theatre and The Book of Sir Thomas More (Cornell U. Press, 1987), 158, has pointed out, the word “hand” is problematic in itself. It is taken as a synecdoche for the writer, but is actually a metonymy for writing, the process rather than the creator. Jeffrey Masten, “More or Less: Editing the Collaborative,” Shakespeare Studies 29 (2001), 115, warns us against the dangers of conflating “writing habits” with “identities,” an observation which further complicates the process of boundaried canonization.
9
Bell’s eight-volume edition of 1785–86 appears to have been the first to bear the title Complete Works. The word Complete appeared with increasing frequency during the mid-late nineteenth century, before becoming standard in the twentieth century.
10 Charles Knight was the first to refer to the disputed plays as “apocryphal” in his edition of 1841. The term was most influentially formalized by C. F. Tucker Brooke in his seminal The Shakespeare Apocrypha (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), which included Arden of Faversham, Locrine, Edward III, Mucedorus, Sir John Oldcastle, Thomas Lord Cromwell, The London Prodigal, The Puritan, A Yorkshire Tragedy, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, Fair Em, The Two Noble Kinsmen, The Birth of Merlin, and Thomas More. 11 Masten, “More or Less,” 109. 12 William Shakespeare: Complete Works, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007). The edition’s original theoretical remit was to edit the First Folio according to its material constitution; but the publishers required the editors to compete at the level of a Complete Works and thus include non-folio plays and poems in the edition. 13 John Jowett, ed., Sir Thomas More (London: Methuen, 2011); Giorgio Melchiori, ed., Edward III (Cambridge U. Press, 1998); Richard Proudfoot and Nicola Bennett, eds. Edward III (Arden, forthcoming). There are as yet no plans for Arden of Faversham to be included in a Shakespeare series; however, recent work by MacDonald P. Jackson, “Shakespeare and the Quarrel Scene in Arden of Faversham,” Shakespeare Quarterly 57 (2006): 249–93, and Hugh Craig and Arthur F. Kinney, Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship (Cambridge U. Press, 2009), has strengthened the case for Shakespeare’s authorship of the middle section of the play. 14 Sonia Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge U. Press, 2007), 151. 15 This history is, in effect, the “negative” history to that articulated by Andrew Murphy’s magisterial Shakespeare in Print (Cambridge U. Press, 2003). The history of the apocrypha has been best told by John Jowett in “Shakespeare Supplemented,” The Shakespeare Apocrypha, ed., Douglas A. Brooks (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007), 39–73, to which I am indebted.
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PETER KIRWAN 16 For the period 1659–99, The London Stage records 306 performances of forty-nine plays attributed to Fletcher, 228 performances of thirty-seven plays attributed to Shakespeare, and seventy-one performances of nineteen plays attributed to Jonson. Furthermore, the Shakespeare figures are heavily skewed by adaptations; including, for example, forty-four performances of Dryden and Davenant’s The Enchanted Island. While Shakespeare was nominally present in the repertory, the extent to which his plays were adapted is symptomatic of the period’s attitude towards him. See Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 17–61. 17 Dobson, Making of the National Poet, 18. 18 For the value of the “First Folio” and its role in constructing Shakespeare’s literary authorship, see Murphy, Shakespeare in Print, 41–51; Jowett, Shakespeare and Text (Oxford U. Press, 2007), 69–92; and Leah S. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (U. of California Press, 1988), 2–24. Massai’s discussion of the 1685 folio (Rise of the Editor, 180–95) sets a standard for discussion of the distinctiveness of later folios, the independent value of which is often underestimated. On the mutually beneficial/ constitutive relationship of the theatrical marketplace to the First Folio, see Francis X. Connor’s contribution to this volume. 19 For a full account of the early history of publishing “rights” of Shakespeare’s works, see Murphy, Shakespeare in Print, esp. 44–45. 20 Jowett, Shakespeare and Text, 24. 21 See Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge U. Press, 2003), 111–14. 22 Erne, “The Popularity of Shakespeare in Print,” Shakespeare Survey 62 (2009): 25. 23 Dates refer to the playbook’s first publication with a Shakespeare title-page attribution. 24 The role of readers in shaping literature has been strongly reasserted in recent years, most notably by William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 1–24 and 151–78, who focuses on annotating readers across the Renaissance; and Massai, Rise of the Editor, who specifically focuses on notations in early Shakespeare editions. 25 The Oldcastle quarto was dated 1600 despite being printed in 1619. The mistake/forgery was not discovered until the twentieth century: see Walter W. Greg, ““On Certain False Dates in Shakespearian Quartos,” The Library 9 (1908): 113–31, 381–409. It is most likely that Chetwind, too, did not realize the date was false when collecting together the 1664 additions. 26 See esp. Greg, “On Certain False Dates,” which was highly influential in shaping opinions of Pavier. More recently, James J. Marino, “William Shakespeare’s Sir John Oldcastle,” Renaissance Drama 30 (2001): 93–114, James P. Bednarz, “Canonizing Shakespeare: The Passionate Pilgrim, England’s Helicon and the Question of Authenticity,” Shakespeare Survey 60 (2007): 252–67, and Jowett, Shakespeare and Text, 71, have attempted partially to rehabilitate Pavier’s reputation by stressing the accuracy of the earlier printings and the association of Jaggard with the project.
SHAKESPEARE APOCRYPHA 27 Tara L. Lyons argues in this issue that eight of the ten plays in Pavier’s collection can be considered as part of a narrative sequence, whether historical (Henry V) or character based (Merry Wives and Oldcastle as Falstaff plays), and suggests that this became a significant aspect of the construction of Shakespeare’s print identity, most obviously realized in the organization of the histories in the 1623 folio. 28 William Shakespeare, Comedies, histories, & tragedies Published according to the true originall copies (London, 1623), A3r. 29 The Whole Contention, Merry Wives, Henry V, King Lear. Pericles is also usually considered a corrupt text. Laurie E. Maguire’s Shakespearean Suspect Texts (Cambridge U. Press, 1996) has done much to rehabilitate many of these texts, although she accepts that Merry Wives and to a lesser extent Pericles may preserve features of memorial reconstruction (285–86, 294–95). 30 Laurie Maguire, “Composition/Decomposition: Singular Shakespeare and the Death of the Author,” The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality, ed. Andrew Murphy (Manchester U. Press, 2000), 142. 31 G. R. Proudfoot and Eric Rasmussen, eds., The Two Noble Kinsmen: 1634 (Oxford U. Press, 2005), vii. 32 The volume also included The Puritan, Thomas Lord Cromwell (the first explicit association of the W. S. initials with Shakespeare), The London Prodigal, and Love’s Labour’s Lost. See Peter Kirwan, “The First Collected ‘Shakespeare Apocrypha,’” Shakespeare Quarterly 62 (2011): 594–601. The three newly attributed plays were not subsequently included in apocryphal collections until the nineteenth century. 33 Stephen Orgel, “The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole,” Shakespeare Quarterly 58 (2007): 290. 34 Proudfoot, Shakespeare: Text, Stage, and Canon, 87–88, points out that Nigel Bawcutt’s identification of a 1622 reference to The Childe hath founde the Father in Henry Herbert’s office-book with The Birth of Merlin suggests that the play was written several years after Shakespeare’s death. 35 Jowett, “Supplemented,” 49. 36 David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge U. Press, 2001), 64. 37 Sidney Lee, A Life of William Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1916), 260. 38 Sidney Lee, Notes and Additions to the Census of Copies of the Shakespeare First Folio (London: Henry Frowde, 1906), 21. Lee notes that it was not until 1905 that the library’s original 1623 folio was recovered (131). 39 Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993): 261–62. The oscillation of Pericles, Titus, and The Two Noble Kinsmen from Malone’s 1790 edition onwards, as well as the debates surrounding Thomas More and various poems, have ensured an ongoing state of flux at the fringes of the canon. The importance of the forty-three-play canon enduring for so long, therefore, should not be underestimated.
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PETER KIRWAN 40 It could even be argued that there were three states to choose from, if one takes into consideration that the earliest issues of the 1623 folio excluded Troilus and Cressida. This appears to have gone unnoticed until Hinman’s pioneering work on the folio in the 1960s, however, and therefore did not feature in eighteenth-century discussion. See Murphy, Shakespeare in Print, 50 and Peter W. M. Blayney, The First Folio of Shakespeare (Washington, D.C.: Folger Library, 1991), 17–24. 41 Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), 31. 42 Ben Ross Schneider Jr., Index to the London Stage, 1660–1800 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois U. Press, 1979), 772. 43 Murphy, Shakespeare in Print, 108–9. 44 Jowett, “Supplemented,” 52. 45 Edmund G. C. King, “Cardenio and the Eighteenth-Century Shakespeare Canon,” Quest for Cardenio, 81–94. I am grateful to King for allowing me to see an advance copy of his paper. 46 J. Tonson, ed., The tragedy of Locrine, the eldest son of King Brutus (London, 1734), 60. 47 R. Walker, ed., The tragedy of Locrine, the eldest son of King Brutus (London, 1734), 50. 48 For an account of this collection, see H. L. Ford, Shakespeare 1700–1740: A Collation of the Editions and Separate Plays with Some Account of T. Johnson and R. Walker (Oxford U. Press, 1935), 33–37. Ford also provides an overview of the quarrel between Tonson and Walker (40–45). 49 The problems of the folio’s generic groupings have been discussed in great detail. See, for example, Stephen Orgel, The Authentic Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 2002), 143–58. Chronological grouping is a more common contemporary method and, in the second edition of the Oxford Shakespeare, allows for certain apocryphal plays to be integrated with the main canon. As Gordon McMullan, Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing (Cambridge U. Press, 2007), 78–104, demonstrates, this is based on post-Enlightenment concerns with biography and tracing authorial development via the works. 50 Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism, 1730–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 24, referring to Tonson’s criticism of Walker’s decision to print Tate’s adaptation, suggests that “Tonson clearly expects the discerning gentleman to want to see Tate’s version but read Shakespeare’s.” Considering the commercial failure of the anti-theatrical edition of Pope, however, it is possible that Walker’s more theatrically aware choice gave the public what it wanted. However, Tiffany Stern, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 223, observes that the prompter W. R. Chetwood “publicly rubbished” Walker’s claims of theatrical accuracy in an address published in Tonson’s 1734 edition. Tonson’s recruitment of a theatrical authority to critique Walker, as well as his own textual authority, ensured Walker was attacked on both fronts. 51 King, “Cardenio,” 87, provides an excellent introduction to Pope’s newly “interventionist” approach to editing.
SHAKESPEARE APOCRYPHA 52 Murphy, Shakespeare in Print, 67. 53 King’s reading of Pope and Swift in “Cardenio,” 82–89, provides fascinating insights into Pope’s conception of canonicity and attribution, particularly the collection’s insistence on the right of the authors to suppress and destroy their own works. 54 Alexander Pope, ed., The Works of Shakespear, 6 vols. (London, 1725), 1:v. 55 Robert Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Cambridge U. Press, 2000), 32. 56 Pope, Works of Shakespear, 1:xx. 57 Edmund G. C. King. “Fragmenting Authorship in the Eighteenth-Century Shakespeare Edition,” Shakespeare 6 (2010): 1–19. 58 Pope, Works of Shakespear, 1:xx. 59 Pope’s poetic subjectivity was influential on disintegrative work throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While the work of the New Shakspere Society in the late nineteenth century attempted to regularize these methodologies, the impressions of poets continued to carry weight. Kenneth Muir writes that Swinburne “has argued most persuasively against the attribution of [Edward III] to Shakespeare [although he] relied entirely on aesthetic arguments . . . Swinburne’s intimate knowledge of Elizabethan drama gives more weight to his opinion than Tennyson’s.” Shakespeare as Collaborator (London: Methuen, 1960), 11–12. Authority here is located not in methodology but in the mind of the poet. 60 Pope, Works of Shakespear, 1:xx. 61 Edward Ravenscroft, in the introduction to his 1687 The Rape of Lavinia, provides the first suggestion of Shakespeare’s collaboration in Titus, and J. M. Robertson, a late nineteenth-century disintegrator, devoted an entire book to the subject. See Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author (Oxford U. Press, 2002), 148–243. 62 Pope, Works of Shakespear, 1:xx. 63 Simon Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearian Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725–1765 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 55. 64 Pope, Works of Shakespear, 1:xxi. 65 Pope, Works of Shakespear, 1:xiv. 66 Dobson, Making of the National Poet, 126, links this to the elevation of theater criticism begun by Addison and Steele in the Tatler and Spectator at the start of the century, which similarly tended to treat the plays as texts to be read rather than to be seen. 67 Orgel, “Desire and Pursuit,” 291.
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PETER KIRWAN 68 Jowett, “Supplemented,” 51. 69 Murphy, Shakespeare in Print, 69. This is in spite of Pope’s public rejection of Theobald’s volume. The problems of silent emendations based on others’ notes is endemic throughout the eighteenth-century editorial tradition, where editors regarded their emendations as an early form of intellectual property. Steevens was particularly infamous in this regard: John Collins, publisher of Capell’s commentaries, went so far as to accuse him of plagiarism (Murphy, Shakespeare in Print, 90–91). 70 The surviving correspondence of Pope does not reveal any thoughts regarding the addition of the ninth volume. 71 Jowett, “Supplemented,” 52. 72 Lewis Theobald, ed., The Works of Shakespeare, 7 vols. (London, 1733), 1:vii. 73 King, “Cardenio.” 74 Lewis Theobald, Double falshood; or, the distrest lovers. A play, as it is acted at the TheatreRoyal in Drury-Lane. Written originally by W. Shakespeare; and now revised and adapted to the stage by Mr. Theobald, the Author of Shakespeare Restor’d (London, 1728), Preface. 75 Theobald, Double falshood, Preface. 76 See Hammond, Double Falsehood, on Theobald’s claims, esp. 122–23. 77 Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope, vol. 3: The Dunciad (1728) & The Dunciad Variorum (1729), ed. Valerie Rumbold (Harlow: Pearson, 2007), 166, 158n, 293n. 78 The line “None but Thy self can be thy parallel” is incorporated into The Dunciad (3.272) as a platform for Pope’s critique, and Hammond devotes an appendix to discussion of the (mis)fortunes of this line (Double Falsehood, 322–24). Pope’s parody of Theobald’s editorial style is deliberately pedantic. 79 Murphy, Shakespeare in Print, 74. 80 See King, “Cardenio.” 81 See also Richard Foster Jones, Lewis Theobald: His Contribution to English Scholarship with Some Unpublished Letters (New York: AMS Press, 1966), 105: “I am rather confident that he did not himself really believe Shakespeare was the author . . . a man of Theobald’s thoroughgoing scholarly nature, who insisted that all conclusions should be supported by proof and authority, would not have rested content with the feeble reasons [of the preface].” 82 The Adventurer has received surprisingly little critical attention, and the significance of Issue 90 as representative of eighteenth-century conceptions of the Shakespearean canon has not been previously noted. 83 The Adventurer, 2 vols. (London, 1753), 2:115.
SHAKESPEARE APOCRYPHA 84 M. John Cardwell, “John Duncombe” ODNB Online (Oxford U. Press, 2008). 85 The Adventurer, 118–19. 86 Dobson, Making of the National Poet, 120, lists examples including Gildon’s 1700 Measure for Measure and Granville’s 1701 The Jew of Venice. The Prologue to Double Falsehood similarly invokes Shakespearean authority, though it ventriloquizes Shakespeare rather than bringing him onstage. 87 Johnson’s involvement in The Adventurer may suggest a closer relationship between the essay and his edition; with the plays formally disowned in the journal, Johnson may well have considered the issue closed. Even Pericles is not mentioned in Johnson’s edition. 88 Samuel Johnson, Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo (Yale U. Press, 1968), 173. 89 Edward Capell, ed., Prolusions; or, Select Pieces of Antient Poetry, pt.2: Edward the third, an historical Play (London, 1760). 90 See Dobson, Making of the National Poet, for detailed discussion of the movements leading up to this event. 91 Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, 111. 92 Edmond Malone, ed., Supplement to the edition of Shakspeare’s plays published in 1778 by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, 2 vols. (London, 1780). 93 See, for example, W. G. Simms, ed., A Supplement to the Plays of William Shakspeare (New York, 1848); Henry Tyrrell, ed., The Doubtful Plays of Shakspeare (London, ca. 1851); William Hazlitt, ed., The Supplementary Works of William Shakspeare (London, 1852); Max Moltke, ed., Doubtful Plays of William Shakespeare (Leipzig, 1869); and A. F. Hopkinson, ed., Shakespeare’s Doubtful Plays (London, 1891–95). 94 Richard Proudfoot, “Is There, and Should There Be, a Shakespeare Apocrypha?” In The Footsteps of William Shakespeare, ed. Christa Jansohn (Münster: Lit, 2005), 49–71; Jowett, “Shakespeare Supplemented,” 66. See also Christa Jansohn, “The Shakespeare Apocrypha: A Reconsideration,” English Studies 84 (2003): 318–29. Taken together, these three papers make a convincing case for the dissolution of the canon/apocrypha dichotomy which has, unfortunately, received little attention.
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Arms and the Book: “Workes,” “Playes,” and “Warlike Accoutrements” in William Cavendish’s The Country Captain Vimala C. Pasupathi
I
n the opening scene of The Country Captain (ca. 1639), a play by William Cavendish, Earl (and later Duke) of Newcastle, the titular Mr. Underwit reports that he has been newly “made a Captain of the traind band” (9).1 When his servant Thomas commends his master for the “desert, and vertue” (39) that earned him this new office, Underwit admits willingly that he is possessed of neither: “thou art deceaued,” he says; “it is the vertue of the Com[m]sion, the Commission is enough to make any man an officer without desert” (41). Endowed with the power to make a man something he is not, the commission functions something like an actor’s part, a sense that Newcastle reinforces as his “Paper Captaine” (11) attempts to perform his role convincingly. He declares, “I must thinke how to provide mee of warlike accoutrements, to accommodate, which comes of Accommodo. Shakespeare the first, and the first” (42–44). Thomas’s glib response—“No, Sir, it comes of so much money disburs’d” (45)—provides a comic end-rhyme for the final clause of his master’s statement, highlighting, even as it nearly elides, an explicit reference to Shakespeare and an allusion to the discussion between Bardolph and Justice Shallow at a Gloucestershire muster in 2 Henry IV. Cavendish’s direct (if also somewhat confusing) invocation of “Shakespeare the first” invites comparisons between the Earl of Newcastle’s own developing dramatic craft and that of the dramatist who had died more than two decades prior.2 More particularly, it encourages audiences to recall Shakespeare’s send-up of military provisioning in 2 Henry IV and to see Newcastle’s country Captain as an heir of sorts to the comic bumblers in that earlier play. Underwit’s musing on the etymology of accomodo is a clear allusion to an exchange at the muster that begins when Justice Shallow inquires after Falstaff ’s (nonexistent) wife. In that scene, Bardolph’s reply that “a soldier is better 277
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accommodated than with a wife” (3.2.66–67) initiates what amounts largely to nonsensical parsing: Shallow.
It is well said, in faith sir, and it is well said indeed too. Better accommodated! it is very good, yea indeed is it. Good phrases are surely, and ever were, very commendable. “Accommodated”—it comes of accomodo. Very good, a good phrase.
Bardolph.
Pardon, sir, I have heard the word. Phrase call you it? By this day, I know not the phrase, but I will maintain the word with my sword to be a soldierlike word, and a word of exceeding good command, by heaven. Accommodated: that is, when a man is, as they say, accommodated, or when a man is being whereby ’a may be thought to be accommodated—which is an excellent thing. (3.2.68–80)3
It is difficult to put much stock in either Bardolph’s or Shallow’s “exceeding good command” of any “soldier-like word,” of course, but their “most gallant leader” (3.2.62) Falstaff is proof that being “accommodated” is “an excellent thing.” His commission not only gives him and Bardolph the authority to “give the soldiers coats,” but also allows him to purchase “two and twenty yards of satin” for his own “short cloak and . . . slops” (1.2.42, 30).4 Like his Shakespearean predecessor, Underwit orders a “Buff coat, and a pair of breeches” (51–52) and a “london dutch felt . . . with a feather” (60) for himself. But where Falstaff exalts in the opportunity to “turn diseases into commodity” (1.2.248) by pressing the “spare men” and releasing the sturdy for a price, Underwit simply boasts about his newly attained authority: “He that was Mr. Underwit is made a Captain,” he tells his friend Monsieur Device; “You may, if you please take notice of his title” (200–1). Monsieur Device (who has artificially enlarged his own title) apologizes to Underwit for saluting him “with a wrong preface” (205), a comment that reinforces Underwit’s status as a “Paper Captain,” but also suggests that members of socially aspirant classes could assert their own place in the social world by performing their familiarity with books. Underwit does the same, of course, when he likens his newly given role to a specific role in a Shakespeare play. Underwit’s new title also demands that he acquire additional titles, albeit ones of a different sort; to further “accommodate” himself with “warlike accoutrements” he sends Thomas to procure “all the bookes that can be bought of warlike discipline, which the learned call Tackticks” (64–65). Thomas’s arrival in the country after visiting the bookstalls in London provides Newcastle with a second occasion to invoke Shakespeare—this time, in an even more literal kind of exchange. Among other “warlike accoutrements” that Thomas has mistaken for “bookes of Martiall Discipline”
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(608) is “Shakespeares workes” (620), a reference to one of the folio collections of his plays first published in 1623, a sizeable volume that, along with several other titles, reveals the servant’s inability to distinguish actual “soldier-like” words from words in book titles that double coincidentally as martial-themed puns. Thomas assumes, for instance, that “The Buckler of Faith” (613) and “The Gunpowder Treason” (618) are gunner’s manuals, and earnestly believes that texts he refers to as “Parsons Resolutions” and “Felthams Resolues” (638) will be ideal for training soldiers to stand firm. The purchase of “Shakespeares workes” stems similarly from the surname’s capacity to convey, as Richard Verstegan once parsed it, “valour and feates of armes.”5 As with all the titles on the receipt, this particular volume, and Thomas’s rationale for purchasing it—without it, he “had nothing for the pikemen” (621), the soldiers charged with shaking their spears in battle— encourage audiences to laugh at the servant for his mistakes. In the specific case of the folio, he reveals that he is as ignorant of the names of playwrights as he is wrong about the nature of the books he has bought. While Underwit does not bother to correct his servant for the purchases that precede the folio on the list, he cannot help but intervene when he notices “Shakespeares workes.” He repeats the title with apparent incredulity, and responds to the selection with obvious exasperation. “They are Playes” (622), he insists, a response that not only protests the purchase itself, but also hints at a tension implicit in the volume’s shorthand title. In pointing out that its contents “are playes,” Underwit activates the distinction between working and playing, and between serious martial labor and recreational pleasures. Still, if the folio is laughable as a “book of Martial discipline,” the Captain himself is just as ill suited for martial enterprise; Thomas’s rejoinder, “Aren’t all your musterings in the country soe” not only takes the “spear” out of Shakespeare, but suggests his master’s theater of war is little more than provincial theater. Indeed, Newcastle puts a theatrical spin on the inexperience that Iago condemns in Cassio, a lieutenant he claims must rely on “bookish theoric” because he has “never set a squadron in the field” (1.1.24, 22). It is worth pointing out here that Newcastle could have made a similar joke with weapon-like titles and printed drama without recourse to Shakespeare’s folio. His name was not, after all, the only one affiliated with the playhouse that could double as a military-themed pun. “Bowers and Fletchers” were both terms associated with archery and were often mentioned together.6 Although the canon of multiauthored works attributed to Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher had yet to launch in folio when Newcastle was writing The Country Captain, these younger playwrights
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were popular in the 1630s and had several plays circulating in print at that time.7 Shakespeare was also not the only playwright whose plays had been published collectively as “workes” in a folio, nor was he the only dramatist whose plays could be associated with “soldier-like words.” Ben Jonson’s folio Workes first appeared in 1616, and he was as notorious for fighting in the low countries as he was for domestic brawls.8 In fact, were “Shakespeares workes” not named explicitly in Newcastle’s play, we might be tempted to see Jonson as the clear inspiration for the series of title-based jokes, since his plays used book-related tropes far more emphatically than Shakespeare did. Indeed, Epicoene’s Jack Daw “buys titles” but has “nothing else of books in him” (1.2.72–73), a description that resonates with Thomas’s blunders as well as Underwit’s lack of martial knowledge.9 Jonson and Newcastle also knew one another quite well, the former writing masques to be performed at the latter’s estate in addition to acknowledging that, aside from the King, Newcastle was his “best patron.”10 The fact that Newcastle invoked “Shakespeares workes” in this instance instead of plays by other dramatists is noteworthy—and not just because it seems to confirm a traditional presumption that Shakespeare has always been a better and more revered playwright than his peers. While Underwit’s need to perform his own legitimacy prevents him from taking the premise of Thomas’s joke seriously, we are free from such fictional constraints and may entertain the possibility that “Shakespeares workes” might indeed have something to offer a country captain and his pikemen in 1639. This essay examines this prospect by considering the reference to the folio and the allusion to 2 Henry IV in the context of that year and of the other texts that Thomas mistakes for “books of Martiall discipline,” all of which belonged to actual books published between 1629 and 1640 or allude to topics discussed in other readily available books during the same period. In fact, though the other listed works appear to be chosen because their respective titles likewise enabled weapon-related jokes, Newcastle also uses them deftly to weave in layers of humor along with more serious political commentary. Examining the place of “Shakespeares workes” among these books affords us a glimpse of printed plays moved among men as particular commodities and, furthermore, offers an especially compelling sense of how the material form and size of the folio contributed to contemporary perceptions of the relative and immediate value of individual plays and of Shakespeare’s own enduring worth. Read in light of the other named works in the play, and considered in the context of other contemporary texts that invoke plays as saleable objects and treasured possessions, Shakespeare’s folio appears in Newcastle’s play as a decidedly unwarlike “accoutrement”—one perhaps uniquely suited to defend against the ideological volatility of the times.
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As I will argue in this essay, the play’s reference is more than just a record of country wistfulness for less dangerous times; it also sheds light on an apparent shift underway in the status of dramatic texts and folio collections within Caroline print culture, inviting us to think more deeply about the status of Shakespeare in a liminal period preceding the onset of civil war as well as the nuances of canon formation that the discourse of early modern print in the play might encode.
“All Books of Controversies” At least some part of the humor in the scene in which Thomas arrives in the country with books in tow derives from the weight and cost of the items that he has brought from London by horse. The “sum[m]a totalis” of “three and twenty poundes, Nynteene shillings and Seuen pence” (640–41) that Underwit reads on the receipt no doubt elicited laughter from contemporary audiences, since the total is more than what consumers spent on books over the course of several years. For instance, Sir Thomas Barrington, an MP from Hatfield Broad Oak, Essex, spent £28, 9s., 4d. on books over a four-year period, only five pounds more than what Newcastle’s character spends in a single outing.11 Their number and cost notwithstanding, Thomas’s purchases are not particularly idiosyncratic in light of those recorded by consumers from the same period. Barrington, for instance, bought Shakespeare’s second folio and a quarto of 1 Henry IV along with a wide variety of other books around the same year that Newcastle was writing his play.12 Additionally, at least one of the books that Newcastle invokes in The Country Captain, Pierre Du Moulin’s The Buckler of Faith, appears in records of expenditures kept by the brothers John and Richard Newdigate, and though neither item was recorded as a purchase in their account books, the Newdigate family also owned a heavily annotated copy of Parsons’s Resolutions and Shakespeare’s First Folio.13 The list of books is perhaps what we should expect from Newcastle, a well-known and highly regarded patron who was intimately familiar with the bookstalls as well as the processes that transformed texts into printed commodities.14 But if Thomas’s selections are not out of step with what book buyers owned in the late 1620s and ’30s, they are nonetheless far afield from the “books of warlike discipline” that his master has requested. In asking for the works “which the learned call Tackticks” (64, 65), Underwit not only invokes a broad category of manuals on military strategy and proficiency in using weapons, but also a set of works identified specifically by that name,
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Aelians Tacticks, which circulated in two parts in at least five editions between 1616 and 1631.15 As noted by Captain John Bingham, who translated the work and provided commentary on its chapters, the term “Tackticks” derived from Grecian leaders, who gave that title to “a few men rightly instructed to manage armes, and trained vp in the obseruation of the discipline of the field.” Because these men “deliuered the Arte Military to such, as were desirous to learne,” Bingham explains, the manual aptly bears their name.16 Although Underwit certainly is “desirous to learn” about his new profession, Thomas mistakenly (and humorously) transposes “Tackticks” into “ticktacks,” and so he acquires two gaming tables instead.17 Thomas makes similar errors in judgment in his purchase of other works, confusing titles that gesture at contemporary religious controversies such as “the gunpowder treason and the Book of Cannons” (619) for contemporary gunner’s manuals.18 Newcastle amplifies the comic potential in every item that Underwit reads from the list of purported “Books of Martial Discipline” in Thomas’s explanation for the selection. For example, he justifies his choice of “A Booke of Mortification” (614) by explaining that it refers to “A kinde of killing, which I thought very necessary for A Captaine” (615–16). Yet the humor goes beyond the surface-level puns for readers who were familiar with the books (and, in most cases, the attendant controversies) that such titles invoke. “A Booke of Mortification” may have been intended to refer to John Preston’s sermon Sins Overthrow: or, A Godly and Learned Treatise of Mortification, a work preoccupied with the sin of fornication. On the title page, that work urged readers to “slay every foule affection” and to “Mortifie therefore, your earthlie members.”19 If the book Thomas purchased did indeed explain this “kinde of killing” in great detail, we can certainly see why the Captain might indeed be mortified (in another sense) by the mere suggestion. Along the same lines, the “the sword Salue” (609) provides fodder for laughs in addition to the initial joke that Thomas makes in misreading its content by its title. Readers familiar with the “Weapon Salve,” a medical theory developed from Paracelsus by Robert Fludd, would know that the cure was composed of urine, along with several other ingredients—among them mummy and moss grown on a human skull—that were exceedingly rare. Fludd believed that it could treat a wound when applied not to the injury, but to the offending blade.20 Thomas’s commentary on the text— “if you bee hurt you neede goe no further then the blade for A surgeon” (611–12)—comically underscores the convenience of the proposed cure while also mocking the improbability of its effectiveness. Certainly some of Newcastle’s book-savvy audience would have known as well that Fludd’s
WILLIAM CAVENDISH’S THE COUNTRY CAPTAIN
description of the salve had earned him a sharp takedown from William Foster, who, in addition to sending it off to circulate more widely in print, apparently nailed his response, Hoplocrisma-spongus: or, A Sponge to Wipe Away the Weapon-salve, à la Martin Luther, to Fludd’s door. In that work, Foster denounced Fludd’s advocacy of “superstitious and magicall Cures” that he claimed “are more frequent amongst Papists.”21 Denouncing him for the false cure as well as for excusing “Fryer Roger Bacon, Trithemius, Cornelius Agrippa, Marsilius Ficinus, and Fratres Rosea crucis, from being Caco-magicians,” or sorcerers, Foster claimed to be scandalized that anyone would be willing to pardon such men, and wondered “that Belzebub was not in the number!”22 Ultimately, he insisted, “Master Doctors argument of sympathy, and his sympathizing Salve, cannot be salved to be naturall and sympathize with reason, though he hath fetched an argument from Dyers and Lyers, from the Divell, the father of Lyers to maintaine it.”23 Fludd defended himself and the salve with Doctor Fludds Answer Vnto M. Foster or, The Squeesing of Parson Fosters Sponge the same year, accusing Foster of writing “misbeseeming termes, foule-mouthed language, and false slanders” and keenly expounding on the properties of the wounded person’s urine, the only substance he maintained would be necessary for treating the actual wound.24 This particular line of defense allows us to detect another layer of coarseness in Newcastle’s reference to “the sword Salue,” as does Fludd’s attempt to throw down an intellectual gauntlet to Foster when he claims that he is “ready to cope with him in the Philosophicall Campe of Minerua, when and how hee dare.”25 In this way, The Country Captain’s joke may have reopened a wound that was probably best left to heal in isolation and out of print. Whereas “the sword Salue” invokes a small-pond fight between two writers, the other books Thomas purchases evoke more significant religious concerns, speaking both to the period’s growing fervor over Laudianism and to the cross-generational nature of spiritual dissent. With their content based on competing sets of church doctrine, the titles Underwit reads aloud are figuratively engaged in a war across national boundaries, churches, and wide periods of time. For instance, the contents of “Parsons Resolutions” (638) is tacitly contested by Thomas’s other purchase, “the Buckler of faith,” a work by Pierre Du Moulin whose full title, The Buckler of the Faith; or, A Defence of the Confession of Faith of the Reformed Churches in France Against the Obiections of M. Arnoux the Iesuite (London: 1631), signals its Protestant and necessarily adversarial stance. Appearing in at least thirty editions between 1584 and 1630, Parsons’s book was vastly more popular than Du Moulin’s.26 Indeed, it was a battle-
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scarred survivor from the time of the Elizabethan Settlement, when its pages had themselves provided a battleground for Catholic and Protestant doctrine. Most of its printed copies contained the emendations of Edmund Bunny, an Anglican Clergyman whose “Treatise of pacification” appended thereto acknowledged the persuasive elegance of Parsons’s work, but also significantly rewrote its accounts of devotional practice to conform with the Protestant Church. Despite Bunny’s claims to having peaceful intentions, Parsons was incensed by what he deemed “infinite corruptions, maymes, and mailings” on his work. Bunny’s response, A Briefe Answer, unto those Idle and Frivolous Quarrels of R. P. fanned the flames by denouncing Parsons’s “moth eaten fragments of poperie,” a retort that may have helped sell more books.27 In Newcastle’s play, the copy of Parsons’s Resolutions is bound up not with Bunny’s additions, but with another book with a similar title. Thomas has also purchased “Felthams resolues,” a shorthand name for Owen Felltham’s highly successful book of aphorisms, Resolues, diuine, morall, politicall. The book first appeared in print the same year as the volume Thomas and Underwit refer to as “Shakespeares workes” and was reprinted seven more times between 1636 and 1698.28 Thomas justifies this purchase for Underwit’s future army with the same comic rationale he uses to explain his acquisition of Parsons’s book: “All is nothing . . . Sir without resolution” (639). As Felltham himself wrote in the dedicatory letters of that work, “Resolutions were needful . . . in this Age of loosenesse”; “there is no Christian so much his minds master, as to keepe precisely all his resolutions.”29 Although it is not a book of “warlike discipline,” this book may have been of some use for a “paper captain” and his soldiers, particularly those mustered in the country who, like Shakespeare’s Shallow and Feeble, lacked experience and direction. As Felltham himself observed of “Unacquaintance” in aphorism 5, “Familiaritie takes away feare, when matters not vsuall, proue inductions to terro. . . . The Imbellicke peasant, when hee comes first to the field, shakes at the report of a Musket: but after he hath rang’d thorow the furie of two or three Battels, he then can fearelesse stand a breach; and dares, vndaunted, gaze death in the face.” But if Felltham’s text offers several observations about battlefield resolve, most of them are not about literal wars so much as matters of religious faith, exemplified by the conclusion of aphorism 92: “as he can neuer bee a good Souldier, that hath not felt the toyle of a battell: so he can neuer be a sound Christian, that hath not felt temptations buffets.” In fact, he acknowledged in aphorism 69 that “resolve” in such matters could lead to further “buffets,” and it is in this particular point that Felltham sees opportunity to cast a stone of his own. “Resolution
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and policy can cast broyles in Christendome, and put ciuill men into ciuill warres,” he asserted, adding, “if you beleeue not this, examine the Iesuite.” In aphorism 83, he provided further evidence, expressing his dismay at “how the Papists (for promotion of their owne Religion) inuent lyes, and print them; that they may not onely cozen the present age, but gull posterity, with forged actions.”30 These assertions—that print gave contested ideas a troubling durability and that words from the past could be transformed into future action—are not just claims that readers could find in Felltham’s text; in fact, they seem to be the precise point Newcastle makes in including two additional books on Thomas’s receipt, “Bellarmines Controuersie” and “The Booke of Cannons” (618, 624), Newcastle’s apparent shorthand title for the Catholic Lectures Concerning the Controversies of the Christian Faith. In justifying why he has purchased the former work, Thomas explains that he bought it “vpon the Stationers word, who had been a pretty Scholler at Paules; for the word Bellarmine, he said, did comprehend warr, weapons and words of defiance, ill wordes prouoke men to draw their sword . . . ” (625–28). The Italian Robert Bellarmine died on the continent more than a decade before the appointment of Archbishop Laud, but “Bellarmine” seems to have become a “soldier-like word” (to borrow Shallow’s phrase) in England after seven years of Laudian reform.31 Still, Bellarmine’s Lectures would not have been more incendiary than the “Book of Cannons,” the Anglican Book of Prayer, whose adoption Charles I had attempted to enforce in the Scottish kirk in 1636. Scottish subjects responded with protests and petitions, renewing their subscription to the Scottish National Covenant as a pointed rejection of religious conformity. Charles responded in 1639 with an angry and ill-advised declaration of war. As one of the Captains granted a commission to raise troops bound for Scotland that year, Newcastle was intimately familiar with the Bishops’ Wars, failed English campaigns resulting in the Treaty at Berwick, whose conditions ended the king’s hope for religious conformity in Scotland and fomented unrest over the cost of arrears at home.32 Newcastle even alludes to the Treaty in The Country Captain in a self-deprecating joke at the beginning of the play when Underwit first tells Thomas to purchase “all the Bookes can be bought of warlike discipline” (63): the servant says, “Considering the league at Barwick, and the late expeditions, I think wee may find some of these things in the North” (66–67), and posits earnestly, “it may bee we may haue them at cheaper rates” (69–70). Certainly, Thomas is wrong in thinking he has purchased books of “Martial discipline” (607), but his claim to have “bought up all that seeme to have
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relation to warr and fighting” (608) is rather truthful on the whole. Indeed, for all the jokes Newcastle makes at Thomas’s expense, the play endorses the servant’s contention that “ill wordes” in books “prouoke men to draw their sword” (626–28). Newcastle’s second wife, Margaret Cavendish, recorded a similar sentiment in her biography of her husband, filing it along with other apparent commonplaces under the heading “I have heard my Lord say”: “all Books of Controversies should be writ in Latin, that none but the Learned may read them, and that there should be no Disputations but in Schools, lest it breed Factions among the Vulgar; for Disputations and Controversies are a kind of Civil War, maintained by the Pen, and often draw out the sword soon after.”33 The Country Captain likewise conveys the sense that books are powerful records of ideological discord, albeit through humor. The list of titles, in “sum[m]a totalis,” works to express a rather melancholy world in which what takes root in print may encourage men to take up arms. Once preserved on the printed page, old controversies could circulate anew—“ill words” did not simply go away. In 1637, the only action that could effect their oblivion was a royal intervention like the one Charles I staged in issuing his “Proclamation for calling in a Book, entituled, An Introduction to a Devout life; and that the same be publikely burnt.”34 The book, written by Saint Francis De Sales and first printed by Nicholas Oakes in 1616, was reprinted two decades later in an edition that, according to the King, contained “divers passages therein tending to Popery” which had been previously excised.35 The proclamation called for the collection of all copies for the purpose of destroying them before an audience; it was not the first time Charles intervened in matters related to the book trade—his proclamation in 1636 discouraged the practice of importing and buying books first published in England that had been reprinted abroad—but its consequences were more obviously dramatic.36 For all its apparent silliness, Newcastle’s play is, in fact, explicitly engaged with the “ill words” in controversial texts, though the play’s engagement with any single account of conflict is—by apparent design—as fleeting as its rapid-fire quips. It is not that such jokes never reach their target, but the target so quickly drops out of conversation that their impression inevitably loses its momentary grip. And perhaps unsurprisingly, after their itemized dismissal by Underwit in the play’s second act, the books never appear again. Although he is unimpressed by their value for his immediate purposes, he declines the servant’s offer to ride back into London and instead orders Thomas to “carry’em into [his] study” (648). There, one must presume, they will remain unread. Rather than commit to the study of books, Underwit trains for his employment by retiring to the tavern with Captain
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Sackbury, a vaguely Falstaffian veteran that he pays to be his “dry nurse” and “read warres to [him], and fortification” (93, 114). Like the Shakespearean captain we associate with sack and sacking, Underwit’s hired “reader” is primarily an expert in drink; perhaps less conventionally, though, he is also well versed in the “phantasticall ayres” of John Adson, the composer who supplied many songs for the Caroline stage.37 Once encamped at the tavern, the two officers discuss whores, not wars, and sing raucously into the night. Busy with the jocular intrigues at the bar, Underwit never actually holds his muster in the country, and the remainder of the play renders him the victim of intrigue at home: Dorothy, a chambermaid, manufactures a noble title for herself through a forged letter, and tricks Underwit into accommodating himself—probably for the worse, as Bardolph suggests in 2 Henry IV—with a wife. The fact that the play’s retreat into comical theater of domestic life in the country coincides with the relegation of books to a confined and private space invites us to think more deeply about the unique status of the texts by Shakespeare to which Newcastle alludes in the earlier parts of the play. Although Newcastle makes clear that none of Thomas’s purchases fit the generic description of “what the learned call Tackticks” of martial discipline, his exasperated protestation about Shakespeare’s works, “they are Playes,” is the only explicit objection he makes to the specific content of the books purchased by the servant. Whereas audiences are left to infer or recognize for themselves why the other titles are not “warlike accoutrements,” his explicit identification of the folio as a volume containing drama acknowledges or confers on the folio its distinct status—even as the act of assembling and naming the titles places the book among others of equal utility for warfare. As I will suggest in the following section of this essay, the volume of plays is distinct from the other named or invoked texts not just because of its genre, but because of the particular effects and implications of the volume’s size and form. Although the identification of the volume’s contents as drama situates “Shakespeares workes” generically and associates it with the stage, its simultaneous depiction as a compilation insists on its circulation as a specific kind of product from the printing house—one that has rendered its contents less timely, though not quite timeless (or “for all time”) in the manner its front matter purports it to be.
“They Are Playes” Underwit’s emphatic relabeling of “Shakespeares workes” as “Playes” highlights an opposition between labor and leisure that might be less pro-
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nounced for modern readers than it would have been for Newcastle and his contemporaries. In his pioneering study of the book trade in early modern England, Douglas Brooks claims that the “opposition between ‘work and play’ was something of a theme in printed collections of dramas.” Citing the dedicatory epistle in William Sheares’s 1633 edition of John Marston’s plays as exemplary of a common phenomenon, Brooks notes the publisher’s claim in that edition to have “styled” the title as “Works” because he has heard that “the name of ” plays “somewhat offends” a “precise Sect” of readers.38 Sheares’s “styling” of Marston’s plays sets up the distinction between a play and work in relation to performance; whereas the play is tainted with its association with the stage, the “work” conveys both effort and sobriety. Moreover, as Joseph Lowenstein suggests in his discussion of this opposition in Jonson’s works, the term inflects the drama with a status that was once reserved for works of poetry. Jonson saw the term “play” as a “stigmatizing term” that, because it was “affixed to performance,” needed to be removed from the printed text in order to promote its superior status.39 Sometime after the spate of folios produced between 1616 and 1620, the prospect of publishing a writer’s entire oeuvre came to be understood as potentially profitable and the volumes themselves as indicators of a writer’s quality or renown. The publication of James I’s own folio, of course, was predicated on an acknowledgment that “Booke-writing” had “‘growen into a Trade,” and by publishing it, as Jan Rickard contends, James made “an attempt . . . to make print into an appropriate vehicle for transaction between king and subject.”40 In a similar manner, according to Lowenstein, Jonson’s folio “vindicated ‘plays’ by associating them with nondramatic poetry and ennobling both by associating them with royal culture.”41 Describing the process in similar terms, Benedict Scott Robinson argues that “The play collection represents a decisive innovation in the publishing of plays, one that incorporated the printed play—an ephemeral text, and the record of an even more ephemeral performance—into high culture by presenting it according to the material, typographical conventions of serious literature. Plays became “works” only in books, and then only in certain kinds of books.”42 Though not all “Works” were published in the folio format, folios that billed themselves as such signaled their distinct size and scope and, in many cases, seem to have been intended to elide the importance of individual texts in lieu of promoting a singular (if not single) creator or creators. That the word “Works” codifies the sense of the emergent privileging of whole canons over the fodder of single plays that could be read or viewed on their own is suggested by a joke about Shakespeare’s “worth” in Robert Chamberlain’s Conceits, Clinches, Flashes, and Whimsies. In this joke, we
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are to infer that a folio for sale offers greater value than individual plays in performance from a comic inversion of this logic: “One asked another what Shakespeares works were worth, all being bound together. He answered, not a farthing. Not worth a farthing! Said he; why so? He answered that his plays were worth a great deale of mony, but he never heard, that his works were worth any thing at all.”43 To appreciate fully its humor, readers had to recognize that “workes” and “playes” invoked different textual forms and conveyed opposing acts of recreation and toil, but also that both works and plays could be—or could be contained within—the same kind of object. Exploiting the fact that “works” was a specific term indicating a collection of multiple printed texts “all bound together” to be sold, its punch line both acknowledged and pushed against the notion that collections of drama were valuable as single products. Its humor reinforces a basic economic truth, that Shakespeare’s folio was “worth a great deale of mony”—at least as much as, and probably more than, quartos offering a single play—even as it purports to refute it. The cost of printing rose exponentially with the number of titles and pages contained within; moreover, Shakespeare was perhaps already understood by 1639 as a writer whose works were valuable commodities and his name clearly was beginning to circulate as a related form of cultural capital. The jokes Newcastle makes with the Shakespeare folio invoked (and perhaps brought on stage) in The Country Captain ostensibly rely less on the puns available in the categories of “Workes” and “playes” than does Chamberlain’s jest, but he does exploit the same tensions inherent in them by naming the collection as a whole and then gesturing at the fictional and theatrical origins of the individual parts that comprised it in Underwit’s exasperated dismissal of the volume as “Playes.” While Newcastle’s reference to “Shakespeares workes” so many years after the latter’s death affirms the enduring value of a First or Second Folio, Newcastle himself seems less concerned with defining the long-term worth of the playwright and his oeuvre by “mony” and name recognition alone than he is with contemplating how “being bound together” necessarily alters their reception and (we can only presume) determines the conditions of their use. This interest is made clear in another part of The Country Captain, in which Underwit’s friend Monsieur Device exposes himself as a liar in an attempt to seduce his beloved. His would-be mistress confronts him for maligning her other suitor and assaulting her honor, threatening him in the language of the printing house and book trade: “Ile fight with you myselfe, in this small vollume,” she declares, “Against your bulke in folio” (2250–51). His response—Device first backtracks on his boasts and then flees the scene—supplies a hint for how
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Newcastle understood the “bulke in folio” that is “Shakespeares workes” as well as all the titles that are (more figuratively) bound together in The Country Captain. With respect to the latter set of works, Underwit reads each title aloud separately, but the books ultimately lose their distinct purpose in the enterprise of reading them together. Like the individual works re-published in the Works of James I, a volume in which polemics were “recontextualized, and the whole repackaged as an oeuvre,” the books in Thomas’s list are rendered by the play’s conceit into parts whose ends are blunted by the process of compilation.44 So too are the “Playes” bound together in folio, identified as “workes” in an assemblage that subsumes the unique content of any particular play, or at least lessens the impact of each one’s singular punch. As this comparison to the folio of James I makes clear, the capacity to reand de-contextualize writing is a feature not just of Shakespeare’s works, but of all folio collections, including that of the king as well as those compiled by his printers between 1616 and 1620, a period Graham Rees and Maria Wakeley refer to as a remarkable “Island in time.” Those years brought forth, in their words, a “spate of special folios which was as unprecedented as it was brief,” setting basic precedents for the folios that, like Shakespeare’s, would appear thereafter. Simultaneously singular and exemplary of conventions, the folio containing the works of James subsumed any time-bound controversy within an individual text and placed it within the broader context of the volume and its time-defying purpose; although it recorded political positions that had troubled English readers when James was King of Scotland, when part of a collection, as Graham and Wakeley note, they were simply “a memory of the king’s Word,” so it could live on in perpetuity.45 In a similar manner, the pamphlets that earned the Venetian Pietro Sarpi’s excommunication could be published in England in “bulke” and diffuse their author’s role in controversy, and so too could Jonson’s Workes, as Lowenstein asserts, take references to the ruinous performances “in the Jacobean quarto forward by placing individual works” away from the stage and more safely “within the coherence of a personal oeuvre.”46And the folio of Marc Antonio de Dominis’s De Republica Ecclesiastica (published in two parts in 1617 and 1620) likewise “developed, extended, and positioned itself generically above and outside the pamphlet wars with which it was associated.”47 The remediation inherent in the act of compiling allowed consumers to see the worth of an item as determined not only by the book’s size and front matter, but also by virtue of its perceived ability to withstand—and, as the authors argue of Bacon’s incomplete Instauratio Magna, even welcome—futurity.48 Further supporting this sense of the collection in The Country Cap-
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tain is the fact that, unlike the other books on Thomas’s list, “Shakespeares workes” registers as comparatively devoid of topical controversy; it is, after all, the only volume Thomas buys that does not participate overtly in an escalating conflict or provide record of a print-world scandal. It is distinct from all the other books that Thomas presents to his master as “books of martiall discipline” not because its contents lacked political or religious content altogether, but because the individual works within it were literally and figuratively contained. Shakespeare’s works lacked or lost topical significance—although the explosion of “local” criticism on them over the past three decades certainly testifies persuasively to the contrary—but the commodified “Shakespeares works” in Newcastle’s play keeps such resonances under cover, or places them at one remove. Keeping tragedy and history bound up with comedy, it could hold in that which might otherwise resonate sharply in the world beyond its fictions; if the book itself was heavier for its multiple contents, it could also be more durable, and paradoxically, lighter. Still, it would be reductive to conclude from this speculation that “Shakespeare’s workes” simply functions in The Country Captain in the way that all folios functioned, for it seems to me that Newcastle was also recording in his play a phenomenon that was more specific to the late 1630s and perhaps even unique to Shakespeare at that time. Indeed, if his play posits a sense of the playwright’s timelessness or endurance, it also figures a concomitant sense of the playwright’s situated-ness both in the world of print and in an earlier period of time. Although the play’s dual references to Shakespeare ostensibly point to Shakespeare’s endurance and his continued relevance on stage, they take on a different valence when we read them in light of accounts by another writer in the country who invoked his works around the same time. This writer is one Ann Merrick, known to us only through a 1639 letter addressed to her friend Mrs. Lydell. In the beginning of the letter, Merrick expressed her fears about “the current war with the Scots.” If “all the young gallants should go for soldiers,” she observed, none would be free to accompany the ladies to the theater or Hyde Park. Yet she also conceded that she was glad for an occasion to read in the relative safety of the country. “I cu’d wish my selfe with you,” she wrote, “and with-all to see the Alchymist, which I hear this terme is revis’d, and the newe play a friend of mine sent to Mr. John Sucklyn, and Tom: Carew (the best witts of the time) to correct, but for want of these gentile [sic] recreations I must content my selfe here, with the studie of Shackspeare, and the historie of woemen, All my countrie librarie.”49 Merrick’s letter provides an especially lively picture of the drama’s
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many modes of circulation in the late 1630s, one that accords with the vision expressed by Newcastle’s characters in The Country Captain. Those who have come from London and the court (or are bound to return there) speak similarly of lively sites of society and culture—“a race at Newmarket” (1355) and the prospect of seeing a “new play” (294, 1359)—while noting that in “ye Country,” one will find “no Exchange,” “no masques,” and “no Playes” (142–43), except for those that Underwit’s servant brings for his master to read. Together, the country letter and The Country Captain affirm Lesser and Farmer’s contention that “Caroline dramatic culture . . . took shape not only in theatres, but also in bookstalls,” for both texts speak to an “on-going desire to read these plays” several decades after they were composed or first performed.50 Yet the snapshots of the process of canon formation that they provide do not conform neatly to the vision of book history that Lesser and Farmer have provided through quantitative means. First of all, whereas Lesser and Farmer indicate that consumers demanded “particular titles” in the Caroline period, both Merrick’s letter and Cavendish’s play speak of Shakespeare in broad terms rather than invoking specific works.51 Merrick’s phrase “my Shakespeare” suggests a single volume, just as Newcastle’s reference to “Shakespeares workes” amongst Underwit’s “warlike accountrements” does with a term more readily identifiable with the book trade. Both references raise the question of whether the object of a Shakespearean collection was beginning to supplant the popularity of any given play in the minds of readers and consumers, and the degree to which this shift was a function or a consequence of the folios’ marketing and paratextual matter. In the First Folio, the writers of dedicatory verses occasionally mention generic categories—for instance, Hugh Holland speaks of “the dainty Playes”—but they almost never mention the titles of individual works. In fact, Leonard Digges’s brief reference to the “Passions of Iuliet, and her Romeo” is the sole reference within the front matter that alludes to a particular play by Shakespeare instead of his oeuvre more broadly.52 This feature of the dedicatory verses represents a stark contrast with those in Jonson’s folio, whose verses contain explicit references to Sejanus, Volpone, and Epicoene, the first and last of which are invoked by name in the very titles of verses by Holland and Francis Beaumont. The lack of specific titles in the dedicatory verses in Shakespeare’s folio presents even more of a contrast with the Beaumont and Fletcher folio printed in 1647. Much has been made of the concerted efforts of the volume’s editors to emphasize the collection as part of a Cavalier effort to preserve the cultural institution of the theater; what has gone without notice,
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perhaps, is the prevalence of character names and titles within these paratexts. While several of the verses extol the virtues of both authors’ “works” in the broad sense, many also praise specific plays and list within them praise for specific titles. Particularly noteworthy in this regard is “Fletcher Reviv’d,” the verse by Richard Lovelace, whose lines are accompanied by seven play titles and two character names that the compositor has set in the margin.53 Unlike other collections that contain but also feature verses promoting specific dramatic works, Shakespeare’s plays in the front matter of both the First and Second Folios are generally undifferentiated from one another. Thus even as “individual printed plays were beginning to emerge as a marketable commodity,” and “began to be separated from all other books” in booksellers’ catalogues, as Adam Hooks has observed, the folios’ front matter seems to push against that separation by design, constructing Shakespeare and his reputation through a comprehensive body of work rather than on specific “hits.”54 In their opening salvo, Hemminge and Condell consign specific characters and individual plays to the status of “Orphans,” but imply that there is no need to name them now that their efforts have seen them safely reincorporated within a family.55 If Jeffrey Todd Knight is correct in asserting that texts from the period were “seen as radically customizable” and thus amenable to reader-curated assemblages and “rubric[s] for interpretation,” we can see the framework imposed by Hemminge and Condell works against this potential. 56 Readers and consumers could take the volume apart in order to organize the contents by their own schema or associations, but those involved in the production of the folio ensured that the book itself resisted any such effort to place the plays and poems alongside texts and contexts other than Shakespeare—a writer who perhaps already had the status of being a “context” in and of himself. Although it is certainly true that Shakespeare’s privileged status stems largely from his treatment by editors in the eighteenth century, the rhetoric of the folio, particular in comparison to the front matter contained in other collections of dramatic works, may shed as much light on the way the writers of a country letter and The Country Captain treat Shakespeare as their respective works tell us about the status of the folio.
“Musterings in the Country” What seems most remarkable about the references to Shakespeare in Newcastle’s play and Merrick’s letter is the way both effectively remove the playwright from contemporary theatrical culture and place him within the
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milieu of the country; in doing so, they identify him not as a playwright so much as an author in a more general sense, and, more narrowly figure him as the author of books. In contrast to Suckling and Carew, who purportedly are reading the work of Merrick’s country friend for a future performance, and distinct from Ben Jonson, whose Alchemist has recently been revived for the stage, Shakespeare is for “studie.” He is neither the author of a “newe play” like Merrick’s friend nor one that warranted being “revis’d” by “the best witts of the time.” Indeed, though he has a clear and treasured place in the library of the country’s elite or aspirant ranks, as we saw in Barrington’s booklist and in Thomas’s purchases in The Country Captain, he is, in Merrick’s words, explicitly consigned to “historie.” Pitched as something one turns to when one cannot be in the company and conversation of the moment, Shakespeare is valuable primarily as a diversion from it; even the Jonsonian corpus—nearly as old but newly embodied on stage—seems more alive. In some ways, the revival is unsurprising, for Jonson had not been dead for much more than a couple of years at that point; just sixth months after his death (and around the same time Newcastle was likely writing The Country Captain) Henry Seile, the same seller listed in the imprint of Felltham’s Resolues, presented a collection of commemorative verses, Ionsonus virbius: or, The memorie of Ben: Iohnson revived by the friends of the Muses (1638). The master of “resolution,” Owen Felltham himself, contributed a poem to this collection, depicting a personified Stage who composes “her selfe a crowne” of wits by placing Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Jonson in “the point Vertical” praising Jonson’s special ability “to write things that Time can never staine,” and therein crediting Jonson with a power Jonson had once reserved for Shakespeare himself in his own commemorative verse in the 1623 folio.57 Given that Jonson was still inhabiting the performance spaces he spurned in addition to bookstalls at this time, it is all the more compelling to consider the role that both Merrick and Newcastle suggest Shakespeare might play off stage for country readers, people geographically removed from the England’s political centers, but nonetheless (or consequently) anxious about what went on in those locales. It is worth noting, along these lines, that many of these readers’ removal from the cities of London and Westminster was mandated by royal proclamations, issued on multiple occasions throughout the 1630s. In the early years of the decade, Charles I justified his command by invoking public health and domestic order. In 1627, Charles had requested “the repaire of Noblemen, Knights, and Gentleman of qualitie, unto their Mansion houses in the Countrey, there to attend their
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services, and keepe Hospitality,” in order to preserve a traditional way of life and to ensure that the gentry were present to attend to “those parts are left distitute both of relief and governement” instead of keeping residence in the cities. In 1631, he issued the same directive “Commanding the Gentry to keepe their Residence at their Mansions in the Countrey, and forbidding them to make their habitations in London, and places adjoyning” on similar grounds, but added an additional explanation. Because “a great part of their money and substance is . . . spent in the Citie in excesse of Apparell provided from Forraigne partys, to the enriching of other Nations” and because of “the excessive use of Forraigne Commodities by this occasion also,” he urged them to return home and instead take pleasure in their profits there.58 And in multiple proclamations in 1636, he commanded members of the nobility to stay in the country and to avoid markets and fairs on account of the plague.59 But by 1639, the tone and rationale of those proclamations had changed; on the 29th of January, Charles issued “A Proclamation commanding the repair of all Noblemen, Knights, Gentlemen, and others, unto their Houses and Lands in the Northern parts,” urging them this time “there to abide for the service and safegard of their Countrey.”60 Further citing “the Laws and Customs of the Realm, and constant practise of all former ages in times of danger,” he insisted they “repair to their severall Houses and Lands there, so as they fail not be there resident and abiding in their persons, with the said Families and Retinue, well arrayed and furnished with good and sufficient Arms, according to their several degrees and qualities, for the defence and safegard of those parts” and “to attend the service and defence of the Countrey.”61 Shortly thereafter, the King saw fit to publish a “A Proclamation and Declaration to inform our loving subjects of Our Kingdom of England of the seditious practices of some in Scotland, seeking to overthrow Our Regall Power under false pretences of religion,” and, of course, then fought to ensure. In the following year, he again reissued the command for his subjects to repair to the country; he also hoped to curtail the circulation of texts imported surreptitiously from beyond the northern border, denouncing the “libellous and seditious Pamphlets and Discourses sent from Scotland” that were “spread and published in divers places of the Kingdom of England”—texts which threatened to turn his English subjects’ loyalties from their monarch to the Scots.62 The effects of political unrest and the consequences of Scottish martial victories would eventually do as Merrick feared and began to impede upon recreational pleasures. Thus in 1639, reading Shakespeare may indeed have become, as both Merrick and Newcastle suggest, a comforting substitute
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for more public—but also increasingly dangerous—activities. When horse racing and other social events were no longer safe or accessible, those with the means could accommodate themselves with books.63 Assembled for “musterings in the country” of a different sort than those for which Newcastle’s captain attempts to prepare, they enabled engagement rather than escape or passive retreat. But if the folio “bulke” could afford its possessors some material and temporal distance from contemporary political problems, what are we to make of The Country Captain’s specific allusion to an individual play? By 1639, 2 Henry IV—the only book that Underwit appears to have actually read—had not been printed in quarto for nearly four decades, so even if Newcastle’s audiences were to recognize the reference, it is likely they would have only had access to it as part of the folio. And more so than most plays about war, 2 Henry IV could invoke the precise impulse to hold in or keep away conflict; it provided readers with a military world in suspense, a globe kept from spinning by its characters’ profound nostalgia for more peaceful times. Their desire to defer or turn back the passage of time is so powerful that the play is hard pressed to deliver the action or outcome promised in its depiction of a civil war. Like Underwit’s itemizing of Thomas’s provocative purchases, Justice Shallow’s catalogue of names and memories both inflect and impede the conscription of soldiers in the countryside. Although Falstaff eventually accommodates a few of the “spare men” that assemble there with coats and weapons, audiences never see these men take the field. Prince Hal even returns to the tavern, if only briefly, and his brother resolves the play’s conflict not by arms, but by hearkening back to a time when subjects still trusted the word of Plantagenet. For his part, Newcastle knew as well as any nobleman in Shakespeare’s depictions of the reigns of Henry IV and V that nothing could keep what Henry IV describes as “the intestine shock” of “civil butchery” (1 Henry IV, 1.1.12–13) at bay. Roughly a year after he wrote The Country Captain, Newcastle was named by suspicious MPs as the prime actor in a royalist “Armie plot,” political theater that had consequences on a much larger stage.64 The rumor that Charles I was “mustering in the country” in order to bring down his own parliament was enough to spark the debates over the control of the militia, which divided the kingdom further and raised the prospect that the king would once again raise his standard against his own subjects. Although this outcome was not inevitable in 1639 or even in 1640, Newcastle must have known it was a possibility. By making jokes about “Shakespeares workes,” he may have been, like Merrick, taking comfort in the quieter plays of an earlier period, confronting an uncertain future, and determined to muster good cheer.
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Although Newcastle’s play suggests that the general “bulke in folio” was no match for the “small volume” of controversy, he no doubt would have agreed with Thomas Fuller’s assessment that the playwright’s wit was victorious in battle because it “could turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his Wit and Invention.”65 The Country Captain’s implicit assessment of the dramatist’s “workes” as a “warlike accoutrement” was hardly a knock on Shakespeare’s virtues as a writer, after all, and his depiction of the folio as a bound product did not imply that its contents were rendered thereby inert. As the prefatory material in Shakespeare’s folios makes clear, the plays’ circulation in print is what kept Shakespeare (and the more recently deceased Jonson, for that matter) alive, and Newcastle understood better than many writers of his time that folio collections, along with posthumous encomia like Ionsonus viribus, granted a shelf life to the poets whom he had both patronized and survived. And of course, this sense of the Folio as a commemorative and ultimately pleasant relic of something past was precisely how Hemminge and Condell pitched the folio to potential buyers, describing the labor of compiling in their opening dedication as an act of commemoration and duty to their deceased fellow and friend. Newcastle’s play (along with Chamberlain’s jest and Merrick’s letter) may, in fact, provide some confirmation that their strategy worked. All the references to Shakespeare that we’ve seen in the 1630s suggest that the folio was becoming a commodity whose immediate value and longterm worth were somewhat at odds. Chamberlain implied in his jest that a Shakespeare play could be prized above the folio only by men who did not understand the labor of a poet and the value conveyed by the form in which books circulated; Newcastle implied in his play that single and small volumes were powerful precisely because they were accessible and fire ready. But if quartos were sharper and more efficient weapons than the unwieldy collection could ever be, the latter were nonetheless a warlike accoutrement worth keeping. Whereas Falstaff turned “diseases to commodity” (1.2.248) by assembling men who would ultimately remain marginal to his king’s war, Newcastle’s own captain brings together print-house commodities whose margins help us see how past and present could converge with the passage of time. The Folio, in particular, emphasizes the virtues of a book whose collective form could embody, but also comfortably clip, the topical currency of any given play. And so it is not surprising, then, that once his books are taken to “his study” and the play’s suitors and soldiers are “accommodated” with wives, Newcastle resolves along with them to tarry a bit in the country. At the end of his play, one character declares that he is soon bound for London.
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His companions seem to understand his desire but also encourage him to remain: “No hast[e] now,” they tell him; “Not tonight sir, wee must haue reuells” (2729).
Hofstra University
NOTES This essay has benefited considerably from conversations with members of the seminar “Shakespeare for Sale” at the 2011 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, and the 2012 meeting of the Society for Textual Scholarship. I am also grateful for comments on earlier drafts of this essay from Adam Hooks, András Kiséry, Andrea Walkden, and Rachel Clark. 1
All quotations from The Country Captain are cited by line number from the Malone Society edition of H. R. Woudhuysen (Oxford U. Press, 1999), which takes its text from Harley MS 7650, dating from 1639 or early 1640.
2
What Newcastle means by “Shakespeare the first” is not clear, though readers familiar with the work of Newcastle’s second wife, Margaret Cavendish, will recall that she uses a similar construction to render herself in royal terms in the dedicatory epistle of The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World (London, 1666): “Though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavor to be Margaret the First” (B3r). Newcastle had not yet met Margaret Lucas when he wrote The Country Captain, however, and we can only speculate whether any concrete relationship exists between fictional Underwit and the actual Duchess who wrote The Blazing World years later.
3
All quotations of Shakespeare are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al., 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
4
On the sartorial excess of Shakespeare’s captain, see Henry J. Webb, “Falstaff ’s Clothes,” Modern Language Notes (1944): 162–64; on the political and martial significance of the coats, see my “Coats and Conduct: The Materials of Military Obligation in Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Henry V,” MP 109 (2012): 326–35.
5
Richard Verstegen, “Of the svrnames of Ovr ancient families,” in A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence . . . Concerning the most noble and renowmed English nation (London, 1605), 294.
6
The latter term involved the production of arrows. See OED for “fletcher, n.”
7
The Scornful Lady, Philaster, A King and No King, Cupid’s Revenge, and The Knight of the Burning Pestle all appeared in print at least once between 1635 and 1639 bearing the names of both dramatists.
8
The workes of Beniamin Ionson (London, 1616).
9
Ben Jonson, Epicoene, ed. L. A Beaurline (Lincoln: U. of Nebraska Press, 1966).
WILLIAM CAVENDISH’S THE COUNTRY CAPTAIN 10 See Nick Rowe, “‘My Best Patron’: William Cavendish and Jonson’s Caroline Dramas,” The Seventeenth Century 9 (1994): 197–212. 11 Mary Elizabeth Bohanon, “A London Bookseller’s Bill: 1635–1639,” The Library, 4th ser., 18 (1938): 417–46, describes this bill as “surprisingly high” since “books were still a luxury even to men of Sir Thomas’s station.” For additional assessments of the cost of books, see H. E. Bell, “The Price of Books in Medieval England,” The Library, 4th ser., 17 (1936): 312–32; H. S. Bennett, “Notes on English Retail Book-Prices, 1480–1560,” The Library, 5th ser., 5 (1950): 172–78; and Francis Johnson, Notes on English Retail BookPrices, 1550–1640 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1950). 12 Barrington’s list does not specify whether the edition of Henry IV is part one or part two, but suggests the folio is the second folio, published in 1632. 13 The copy of the well-known book by the English Jesuit Robert Parsons is titled A Christian directorie gviding men to their salvation. Devided into three bookes. The first whereof apperteining to resolution, is only conteined in this volume, deuided into two partes, and set forth now againe with many corrections, and additions by th’ authour him self, with reprofe of the corrupt and falsified edition of the same booke lately published by M. Edm. Buny (Rouen, 1585). It is not clear whether the family owned the folio prior to 1660, the date that appears on an inscription signed by John Newdigate IV. This copy, as well as the edition of Parsons’s Resolutions, is held by the Harry Ransom Center for Humanities Research at the University of Texas at Austin. Vivienne Larminie offers a useful account of the Newdigates’ reading preferences in Wealth, Kinship, and Culture: The SeventeenthCentury Newdigates of Arbury and Their World (London: Royal Historical Society, 1995); essays in a special issue of Early Theatre 14.2 (2011) expand on Larminie’s findings with discussions of recently discovered plays in manuscript in the family’s possession. 14 Gerard Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatic Poets (Oxford, 1691), 386. On Newcastle’s patronage of dramatists, see Henry Ten Eyke Perry, The First Duchess of Newcastle and Her Husband as Figures in Literary History (Boston: Ginn, 1918), and, more recently, Rowe, “‘My Best Patron,’” and David M. Bergeron, Textual Patronage in English Drama, 1570–1640 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006). 15 On the circulation of military manuals in the period, see David Lawrence, The Complete Soldier: Military Books and Military Culture in Early Stuart England, 1603–1645 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), and “The Evolution of the English Drill Manual: Soldiers, Printers, and Military Culture in Jacobean England,” Negotiating the Jacobean Printed Book, ed. Pete Langman (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011). The best survey of manuals in print prior to 1603 remains Maurice J. D. Cockle’s A Bibliography of English Military Books up to 1642 and of Contemporary Foreign Works (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, and Kent, 1900). 16 The Tactiks of Ælian: or, Art of Embattailing an army after ye Grecian manner, trans. John Bingham (London: 1616), Av. The art of embattailing an army: or, The second part of Ælians tacticks appeared twice in 1629 and in a third edition in 1631. The 1629 edition contains an engraving by Martin Droeshout, famous, of course, for the portrait of Shakespeare in the folios. 17 The OED records a quotation from Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour for “Ticktacks,” defining it as “an old variety of backgammon, played on a board with holes along the edge, in which pegs were placed for scoring.
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VIMALA C. PASUPATHI 18 Robert Norton’s works were by no means the only books of this nature, but he did have three come out in or around the late 1620s, The gunner (London, 1628), The gunners dialogue (1628), and Of the art of great artillery (London, 1624). 19 John Preston, Sins Overthrow: or, A godly and learned treatise of mortification (London: 1633), 3. At least two other books were published around the same time with “Mortification” in their titles, including Thomas Goodwin’s The tryall of a Christians growth in mortification, or purging out corruption (1641) and Saint Bernard his meditiations: or Sighes, sobbes, and teares, vpon our Sauiours passion in memoriall of his death. Also his motiues to mortification, with other meditations (1631). 20 Fludd’s first discussion of the salve apparently appeared in Anatomiae amphitheatrum (Frankfurt, 1623). On Fludd see Joscelyn Godwin, Robert Fludd: Hermentic Philosopher and Surveyor of Two Worlds (Grand Rapids, MI, Phanes Press, 1979), esp. 7–9. 21 William Foster, Hoplocrisma-spongus: or, A sponge to wipe away the weapon-salve A treatise, wherein is proved, that the cure late-taken up amongst us, by applying the salve to the weapon, is magicall and unlawfull (London, 1631), A3, A2v. 22 Foster, Hoplocrisma-spongus, 39. See OED for “Caco-magician, n.” 23 Foster, Hoplocrisma-spongus, 52. 24 Doctor Fludds answer vnto M. Foster: or, The squeesing of Parson Fosters sponge, ordained by him for the wiping away of the weapon-salue Wherein the sponge-bearers immodest carriage and behauiour towards his bretheren is detected (London, 1631), 68. 25 Doctor Fludds answer, 68. 26 The English Short Title Catalogue includes some fifty editions between 1584 and 1699. Du Moulin’s The Buckler of Faith, or, A defence of the confession of faith of the reformed churches in France, against the obiections of M. Arnoux the Iesuit (London, 1631) went through at least three editions between 1620–31. 27 Edmund Bunny, A Briefe Answer, unto those Idle and Friuolous Quarrels of R .P. (London, 1598), 2v. 28 Owen Felltham, Resolues, diuine, morall, politicall (London, 1623). 29 Felltham, Resolues, A2v–A3, A7v. 30 Resolues, 18, 301, 223, 269. 31 Bellarmine was cited as “the encouragor,” “if not the author,” of “the Powder Treason” in Jeremy Taylor’s Vpon the anniversary of the Gunpowder-Treason (1638), 18, a sermon published at Oxford that could be the text Newcastle intended in his reference to “the gunpowder treason” (618).
WILLIAM CAVENDISH’S THE COUNTRY CAPTAIN 32 On the Bishops’ Wars, see Mark Charles Fissel, The Bishops’ Wars: Charles I’s Campaigns against Scotland, 1638–1640 (Cambridge U. Press, 1994). Newcastle complained about the state of the trained bands in the years leading up to this conflict to the privy council. See Kevin Sharp, The Personal Rule of Charles I (Yale U. Press, 1996), 629. 33 Margaret Cavendish, The Life of the Thrice Noble, High and Puissant Prince William Cavendishe (London: 1667), 167. 34 James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes, eds., Stuart Royal Proclamations, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 2:557. 35 Larkin and Hughes, Stuart Royal Proclamations, 2:557. The book is precisely that named in the proclamation, An Introduction to a Devout Life (n.d.). Larkin and Hughes cast doubt on the crown’s assertions about the book; see 2:557n2. 36 Larkin and Hughes, Stuart Royal Proclamations, 2:511. 37 On Adson’s career, see David Lasocki, “Adson, John,” ODNB. Captain Sackbury refers to Adson by name as the composer for the ditty. Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge U. Press, 2009), 129, notes that the lyrics were written by John Shirley. 38 Douglas A. Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge U. Press, 2000), 136. 39 Joseph Lowenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge U. Press, 2006), 194. 40 Jan Rickard, “John Donne, James I and the Dilemmas of Publication,” Negotiating the Jacobean Printed Book, ed. Pete Langman (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2011), 92. 41 Lowenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship, 200. 42 Benedict Scott Robinson, “Thomas Heywood and the Cultural Politics of Play Collections,” SEL 42 (2002): 361. 43 Robert Chamberlain, Conceits, clinches, flashes, and whimzies Newly studied, with some collections, but those never published before in this kinde (London, 1639), E4. 44 Graham Rees and Maria Wakeley, Publishing, Politics, and Culture: The King’s Printers in the Reign of James I and VI (Oxford U. Press, 2010), 95. 45 Graham and Wakeley, Publishing, Politics, and Culture, 93, 100. 46 Lowenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship, 200. 47 Graham and Wakeley, Publishing, Politics, and Culture, 104.
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VIMALA C. PASUPATHI 48 Of Bacon’s folio, Graham and Wakeley, Publishing, Politics, and Culture, 119, write: “This is canon-formation with a vengeance for it is a prospectus for a whole corpus of work yet to be written.” 49 “Charles I - volume 409: January 1–23, 1639,” Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Charles I, 1638–9, ed. John Bruce and William Douglas Hamilton (1871): 286–356, British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk. 50 Zachary Lesser and Alan B. Farmer, “The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited,” Shakespeare Quarterly 56 (2005): 11. 51 Zachary Lesser and Alan B. Farmer, “Canons and Classics: Publishing Drama in Caroline England,” Localizing Caroline Drama, 1625–1642, ed. Alan B. Farmer and Adam Zucker (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 30. 52 Charlton Hinman, The First Folio of Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1996). Quotations from the Folio’s prefaces come from this edition. 53 Comedies and tragedies written by Francis Beaumont and Iohn Fletcher (London 1647), B2r, B3. 54 See Adam G. Hooks, “Booksellers’ Catalogues and the Classification of Printed Drama,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 102 (2008): 445–64. 55 Mr. William Shakespeares comedies, histories, & tragedies (1623), A2v. 56 Jeffrey Todd Knight, “Making Shakespeare’s Books: Assembly and Intertextuality in the Archives,” Shakespeare Quarterly 60 (2009): 320. Since his focus is on reader-produced collections, Knight does not mention works collected and published in folio in his essay. While my own reading conforms with Knight’s basic sense of “how anthological thinking guides interpretation” (336), it departs from his in imagining that the collection dissolves specificity within works rather than emphasize particular themes. 57 Ionsonus virbius: or, The memorie of Ben: Iohnson revived by the friends of the Muses (London, 1638), 43–44. 58 Larkin and Hughes, Stuart Royal Proclamations, 2:172, 251. 59 Proclamations 222, 224, and 225 declare cancellations at various markets and fairs and command the nobility to leave London and Westminster on account of plague: Stuart Royal Proclamations, 2:516, 528, 530–31. 60 Larkin and Hughes, Stuart Royal Proclamations, 2:648. 61 Larkin and Hughes, Stuart Royal Proclamations, 2:649. 62 Larkin and Hughes, Stuart Royal Proclamations, 2:703. 63 On the connections among horse racing, political uprisings, and Anglo-Scottish conflicts, see my essay “Jockeying Jony: The Politics of Horse-Racing and Regional Identity in The Humorous Magistrate,” Early Theatre 14 (2011): 149–82.
WILLIAM CAVENDISH’S THE COUNTRY CAPTAIN 64 See Conrad Russell, “The First Army Plot of 1641,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 38 (1988): 85–106, esp. 93–94. For a fascinating account of Cavendish’s role in rumor-mongering through print, see “‘The times are dangerous’: An Unnoticed Allusion to William Cavendish’s The Variety (1641–1642),” ANQ 21(2008): 35–40. 65 Thomas Fuller’s comments appear in his rendering of the “wit combates betwixt [Shakespeare] and Ben Johnson” in his History of the Worthies of England (London, 1662), 126.
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Playbills, Prologues, and Playbooks: Selling Shakespeare Adaptations, 1678–82 Emma Lesley Depledge
T
he years 1678 to 1682 witnessed two related, yet seemingly unrelated, events: the monarchy faced its greatest threat since the 1640s, and William Shakespeare’s plays underwent the most sustained period of alteration in his authorial afterlife.1 Having all but vanished from the print and performance market by the late 1660s, the plays made a forceful return in the late 1670s and early 1680s. Ten Shakespeare alterations appeared on stage, and nine in print between 1678 and 1682, at a time when Charles II was at loggerheads with parliament over its right to meet, and its attempts to bar his Catholic brother from the succession. In fact, versions of Shakespeare’s plays—many of which had yet to appear on the restored English stage—made up almost one fifth of all new plays mounted during these four theatrical seasons.2 The altering playwrights built on Shakespeare’s plots and characters in order to produce topical, political plays that reflected contemporary concerns and disputes. It would therefore appear that the Exclusion Crisis, a succession dispute that threatened to return the country to a state of civil war, helped to generate a market for rewritten versions of Shakespeare’s plays.3 By exploring Shakespeare’s position in the performance and print market for the twenty-two years after Charles’s Restoration, this paper argues for the importance of the Exclusion Crisis as the watershed moment in Shakespeare’s afterlife. I take the reopening of the theaters and the establishment of the two patent theater companies, the King’s Company and the Duke’s Company, in 1660, as my starting point, ending with the former’s financial demise and the creation of the United Company in 1682. I intend to make three associated claims. The first is that Shakespeare was less of a name and presence in the years preceding the Crisis (1660–77) than is usually recognized, with the number of alterations and revivals of his plays in decline from the late 1660s, and few new print editions appearing on the market. 305
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My second claim is that the material conditions ushered in during the Crisis—such as theatrical recession, harsh stage censorship, and a demand for plays offering direct engagement with contemporary politics—helped to generate a market for Shakespeare redactions, with playwrights and theater managers (re)turning to the practice of alteration in large numbers. During the Crisis versions of Shakespeare’s plays were not only staged on an unprecedented scale, but also sold to theater patrons as products of his labor. The promotion of Shakespeare found in stage prologues offers stark contrast with his treatment in the printed playbooks,4 where his name was no longer used to sell altered versions of his plays. I examine the ways in which Exclusion Crisis alterations of Shakespeare were (often disingenuously) marketed in playbills, prologues, and playbooks. I will suggest that playwrights and theater managers deployed shrewd, media-sensitive marketing strategies that likely revolutionized Restoration London’s awareness of a (by then long-dead) playwright named Shakespeare. By tracing a play’s journey from playbill to stage prologue to printed playbook, one gains insight both into Shakespeare’s perceived salability and the ways in which late seventeenth-century plays could be advertised for performance and print. My essay thus approaches the topic of “Shakespeare for Sale” by considering the extent to which Shakespeare’s name was used to sell plays, as well as the occasions when his plays, or versions of his plays, were and were not deemed vendible between 1660 and 1682. Scholars of Shakespeare’s authorial afterlife have tended to survey lengthy time spans, generally concurring that the eighteenth century witnessed the most significant moment in Shakespeare’s journey towards canonization.5 I believe that focusing on shorter periods of history allows us to observe more immediate changes in the ways in which “Shakespeare”—by which I mean both the brand name and the product, to put it anachronistically—was sold. It also helps to further dispel the view that the decision to revive and alter Shakespeare’s plays was inevitable or progressive. With the notable exceptions of Don-John Dugas and Robert D. Hume, critics have also tended to assess Shakespeare’s authorial status by considering Shakespeare allusions alongside print and performance records.6 Such an approach arguably generates a distorted sense of how well and widely known Shakespeare’s works were in the early Restoration. I endorse Dugas’s view that “if a comment about Shakespeare appeared in the printed edition of a play neither written by nor adapted from Shakespeare, many people looking for references to the playwright were probably ignorant of its existence,” 7 but I am skeptical as to how many people would have been actively been looking for reference to a long-dead playwright. John Dryden sometimes did and sometimes did not appreciate
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Shakespeare.8 This tells us a lot about Dryden and his changing opinions and agendas, but it tells us little about Shakespeare’s status in the late seventeenth century. By contrast, a Shakespeare play’s presence in, or absence from, the seventeenth-century theater and print market is significant. Equally, by making reference to Shakespeare in the prologues to their plays, those who altered Shakespeare’s works during the Exclusion Crisis ensured that audiences would hear about Shakespeare whether they sought to do so or not. I thus wish to stress the need to contextualize exposure to Shakespeare, observing when, how, and why late seventeenth-century Londoners come in contact with Shakespeare’s name, with his works, and, perhaps most importantly, with his name in association with his works.
Shakespeare in Performance and Print, 1660–77 The Duke’s Company and the King’s Company had staged Shakespeare’s plays in altered and unaltered form before 1678, but the practices of both alteration and Shakespeare revival seem to have waned from the late 1660s. As Table 1 (Appendix) shows, although sixteen new Shakespeare alterations were produced between 1660 and 1682, the practice was at a standstill for over a decade. William Davenant, manager of the Duke’s Company, was responsible or jointly responsible for four of the six Shakespeare alterations produced between 1660 and 1667 (The Law Against Lovers, The Rivals, Macbeth, and The Tempest), and his death in spring 1668 may account for the lack of new Shakespeare alterations mounted between 1668 and 1677. No new alterations were produced between Dryden and Davenant’s The Tempest, or, The Enchanted Island (premiered 1667 and printed 1670) and the first of the Exclusion Crisis alterations, Thomas Shadwell’s The History of Timon of Athens, the Man-Hater (premiered and printed 1678).9 This hiatus in Shakespeare alteration is often masked by a failure to clearly distinguish Shakespeare alterations from plays which are at least two removes from a Shakespeare source text; Shadwell’s The Tempest, or, The Enchanted Island (1674) and Thomas Duffet’s The Mock-Tempest: or, The Enchanted Castle (1674) are alterations of alterations. Shadwell’s Tempest is both an opera and an alteration of Dryden and Davenant’s The Tempest, or, The Enchanted Island, while Duffet’s play is a burlesque of Shadwell’s play. Comparative readings suggest that neither consulted Shakespeare’s play as a source text. By excluding Shadwell and Duffet’s plays from the canon of Restoration alterations of Shakespeare one gets a more accurate view of the low appeal Shakespeare’s plays had as source texts after the first decade of the Restoration.
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Data contained in The London Stage suggests that the number of revivals of Shakespeare’s plays was also in decline from the late 1660s. In fact, the number of recorded performances decreased by almost 50 percent when compared with the first decade of the Restoration. Approximately thirtyeight Shakespeare performances, an average of 3.8 per year, took place during the period 1660–70 but only around fourteen performances, an average of two per year, were mounted in the period 1670 to 1677.10 It seems that, by the 1670s, “the Duke’s Company”—who produced all but one of the alterations of 1660–67, and staged the majority of the Shakespeare revivals—“had a well-balanced, modern repertory, which meant that it no longer needed to rely so heavily on its stock of Shakespeare plays.”11 It might thus be argued that the revival and alteration of Shakespeare’s plays did not follow a linear trajectory, and this was largely because theater managers and playwrights’ interest in Shakespeare’s plays had dried up in the years preceding the Exclusion Crisis. Shakespeare’s plays had also been printed in altered and unaltered form between 1660 and 1677, but single-play editions were rare and the altered plays were seldom sold under or linked to Shakespeare’s name. A list of all Shakespeare plays, and all plays attributed to Shakespeare during the early Restoration period (i.e., through title-page attribution, or their inclusion in the Third Folio second issue) is provided in Table 2 (Appendix). Here one sees that, apart from the two issues of the Third Folio, only three Shakespeare plays were printed in single-play editions between 1660 and 1677. Of these, The Birth of Merlin, a play now almost unanimously rejected from the Shakespeare canon, and two editions of Hamlet were advertised as “By William Shakespeare,” while the 1673 edition of Macbeth contained no reference whatsoever to Shakespeare’s name. Only four of the six alterations staged between 1660 and 1677 appeared in print before 1677 (see Table 1) and none were printed with Shakespeare’s name on the title page. Only one, the Dryden and Davenant Tempest, contained any reference to Shakespeare. In sum, while printed editions of Shakespeare’s plays were generally attributed to him, they occupied a marginal position in the print market, and there was little way for readers to deduce that Shakespeare was in any way responsible for plays derived from his own. This situation changed dramatically during the Exclusion Crisis. Nine Shakespeare alterations were staged in only four theatrical seasons. This number rises to ten if we consider the calendar years 1678–82. As noted above, Shakespeare alterations constituted almost 20 percent of all new plays staged during these seasons. At least seven of the altered plays appeared on stage with prologues advertising them as products of Shakespeare’s labor, thereby making audiences “explicitly aware for what was probably the first
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time in the late seventeenth century that a play it was about to see had been written by a man named Shakespeare.”12 In order to understand why an unprecedented number of Shakespeare plays were altered at this time, and why so many of them cited Shakespeare’s name in their prologues, we must turn to the material conditions that made alteration—and alteration of Shakespeare’s plays in particular—an appealing option for theater managers and professional playwrights.
Alteration of Shakespeare’s Plays during the Exclusion Crisis Elkanah Settle uses a simile based on Christopher Columbus’s experience in the Americas to compare the theatrical climate of the 1660s with that of the late 1670s and early 1680s, noting that The very best of Plays now find but a cold Reception in comparison of the kinder entertainment they met, at the King’s first Returne. For players and Plays came then upon the Stage like Columbus into America, they brought new Faces, and almost a New Language into our World; and what betwixt Novelty and Surprise they won Spectators Hearts so easily . . . But Time and Conversation has made the critical Audiences like the Wise Indians; and he that would please ’em now must purchase their Applause with Solid and Elaborate Sense, and bring more than Glass to barter for their Gold.13
He suggests that the economic power held by plays and playwrights when the theaters reopened in 1660 had shifted to audiences by the 1680s, with playwrights and theater managers now struggling to make a return from theatrical productions. In order to make money from the theater, playwrights not only had to get a play staged, but had to get it staged at least three times. Only playwrights who were contractually linked to a specific company would have received a fixed wage in exchange for play scripts, but these posts were rare, and the companies were paying for their right to first refusal of the script, with no guarantee that the play would actually be performed.14 Playwrights were entitled to the third night’s profit (minus house expenses), but they stood to make no return at all if their play’s run ended before the third night. This is an important consideration, since “to be assured of eating, a playwright pretty much needed to get a new play successfully staged every year.” Even if playwrights managed to get their plays successfully staged, their income would depend on the number of paying customers on the third night. Hume states that the theaters in question, “Dorset Garden and Drury Lane . . . had a normal maximum gross of about £105 (with serious crowding),” while average house expenses came to about £20, but evidence suggests that the playhouses were far from full during the Crisis, and that playwrights had great difficulty making a living from the stage.15
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The low attendance figures recorded during the Exclusion Crisis had a negative impact on the Restoration theaters. Leslie Hotson documents how three of the “worst days” in the history of the King’s Company’s takings occurred in 1681: “11 May, 1681, £3 14s. 6d.; 30 May, 1681, £3 2s.; 18 June, 1681, £3 13s.,” and that “on sixteen other days the receipts were not sufficient to meet the necessary expenses.”16 The low attendance level is clear, given that regular admission charges were “boxes 4s., pit 2s. 6d., galleries 1s. 6d. and 1s.”17 Indeed, it appears that the theater was at times forced to “desist from acting of plays,” dismiss “the Audience and [refund] their respective moneys.”18 In about March 1682, by which time Charles II had closed Parliament for the last time and effectively safeguarded his brother’s succession, the theatrical duopoly established in 1660 came to an end. The Duke’s Company later merged with the failing King’s Company in order to form the United Company, and the Crisis is often seen as a key factor in the King’s Company’s financial demise.19 The hardships playwrights faced during the Exclusion Crisis are frequently lamented in prologues, epilogues and prefaces to contemporary plays. The prologue to John Crowne’s second Shakespeare alteration, Henry the Sixth, The First Part (1681) regrets that “Play-Houses like forsaken Barns are grown,” while Shadwell attributes the failure of his A True Widow (1679) to the “Calamity of the Time, which made People not care for Diversions,” and to “the Anger of a great many, who thought themselves concern’d in the satyr,” thereby pointing to the impact the period’s increased political sensitivity had on the theater market.20 The prologue to Aphra Behn’s The Feigned Curtizans (1679) also complains that the “cursed plotting Age” has “ruin’d all our plots upon the Stage.”21 Naturally, paratextual comments need to be taken with a pinch of salt, but, coupled with the documentary evidence cited above, they do suggest that theater proprietors and playwrights found it hard to make a living in the late 1670s and early 1680s. These conditions, I wish to suggest, made the alteration of an earlier play an appealing option. Impetus for the unprecedented alteration of Shakespeare that took place between 1678 and 1682 may have come from the protection an old playwright’s name offered during a period of intense theatrical censorship.22 Calhoun Winton notes that “only twice during the entire one hundred and forty years [1660–1800] was there a sustained effort at political censorship: during the Exclusion Crisis in the early 1680s and shortly after the passage of the Licensing Act of 1737.”23 In fact, at least half of the eighteen plays banned from the stage between 1660 and 1710 were suppressed in the late 1670s and early 1680s.24 Maximillian Novak has suggested that, because “in order to survive, the stage was forced to become an arena for political
SHAKESPEARE ALTERATIONS
statement, authors might find some protection from factional revenge . . . by claiming to be merely revising an old play.”25 This tactic can be found in the prologues used to introduce a number of plays performed during the Exclusion Crisis. For example, the prologue to John Banks’s The Destruction of Troy (1679) uses the temporal distance of the play’s Trojan subject matter to describe the material as “plain” and “homely,” as opposed to political and controversial; it is but “a Christmas Tale [that] has oft been told / Over a Fire by Nurse, and Grandam old.”26 The prologue to Crowne’s alteration of Seneca’s Thyestes (1681) similarly hides the play’s politics behind references to Greece and Rome, telling audiences that “To Day . . . we try / If we can awe you, with an ancient lye.”27 As I go on to argue below, the theatrical paratexts to Shakespeare alterations of the Exclusion Crisis contain similar rhetoric, and Shakespeare’s name, like a play’s status as “old,” appears to have been used to protect plays from theatrical censors. The correlation playwrights found between Shakespeare’s plays and the politics of their own time may account for their decision to alter Shakespeare more often than any other playwright between 1678 and 1682.28 The ten plays altered during the Exclusion Crisis (see Table 1) are predominantly taken from Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies.29 Shakespeare’s works interrogate political issues that were hotly debated in the late 1670s and early 1680s, such as the rights of Parliament, regal succession, and the occasions on which subjects might justifiably resist monarchical rule. His plays also deal with historical reigns, including those of Richard II and Henry VI, which were being applied to the Exclusion Crisis in political tracts of the 1670s and 1680s. These reigns, and the Wars of the Roses more generally, were repeatedly cited in political writings of the late 1670s and early 1680s, as they offered examples of deposed kings and changes to the legal line of succession while also emphasizing the delicate relationship between monarchs and their parliaments. As one pamphlet put it, “The unfortunate Reigns of . . . Richard II. and Henry VI. ought to serve as Land-marks to warn succeeding Kings; from preserring [preferring] secret Councils to the wisdom of their Parliaments.”30 Shakespeare’s plots and characters thus provided ready-made parallels for playwrights seeking to interact with the key figures and debates of the Exclusion Crisis. Playwrights and theater managers may also have been attracted to Shakespeare’s plays because of their relative absence from the print and performance markets. It appears that they recognized an opportunity to advertise the altered plays as they saw fit without worrying that patrons would have enough knowledge of Shakespeare to challenge their claims about a play’s status as new, old, or apolitical. As the data in Table 3 indi-
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cates, the Shakespeare plays selected for alteration between 1678 and 1682 will have been unfamiliar to audiences and readers. Only two of them, Romeo and Juliet and King Lear, had been performed since the theaters reopened. None had appeared in print since the Third Folio of 1663/4, and only King Lear had been printed in a single-play edition since the closing of the theaters in 1642. Three of the plays selected for alteration had never appeared in single-play editions. The catalogue of plays appended to Tom Tyler and His Wife (London, 1661) and Nicomède (London, 1671) may list the Shakespeare plays selected for alteration, along with other Shakespeare plays and apocryphal plays, but it is important to remember that both catalogues list all the plays “that were ever yet printed and published” that patrons “may either buy or sell” (emphasis mine) at the shops listed.31 The catalogue merely details texts that had appeared in print at some point; it offers no guarantee that any of the plays were still freely available from late seventeenth-century bookshops. It thus seems likely that the majority of audiences will not have known the Shakespeare texts altered between 1678 and 1682. The advertising strategies I go on to identify below suggest that playwrights, theater managers, and printers were keen to exploit this fact when selling Shakespeare alterations for the stage and page.
Alterations in Playbills, Prologues, and Playbooks Y’ave met us in defiance of the Weather: How has our Magick Conjur’d ye together? ’Twas a New Play, there doubtless lay the Charm That drew to our forsaken Hive this Swarm. To sooth your Humour more what could we doe? The Play to Night is New, the Poet too.32
Thus began the prologue to Nahum Tate’s Brutus of Alba, or The Enchanted Lovers (1678). In order to make money, the Duke’s Company and the King’s Company first had to attract patrons, particularly as they were in direct competition with one another. Playwrights were concerned to get their play to its third performance, and theater companies wanted to attract paying patrons as soon as possible and as often as possible. This was a particularly pressing concern during the Exclusion Crisis, when attendance, and thus profits, were very low indeed. A key way to attract patrons, as signaled by the prologue to Brutus of Alba, was to advertise a play as new or novel. Altered plays of the period were likely billed as novel, be it as “revived with alterations,” “Altered,” or under a new title.33 New plays “had a particular cachet and cost more to see,” so emphasizing a play’s novelty in playbills made good financial sense.34
SHAKESPEARE ALTERATIONS
Shakespeare alterations of the Exclusion Crisis may have been promoted as new or significantly altered when performances were advertised in playbills across London.35 Indeed, the prologues to Tate’s King Lear and Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida seem to indicate that the plays were first advertised as new. The prologues then announce that they are not new, thus carefully and diplomatically modifying the audience’s expectations. In the prologue to Troilus and Cressida, the audience is told that the play contained “some Master-Strokes, so manly and so bold / That he [i.e. Dryden] who meant to alter found ’em such / He shook; and thought it sacrilege to touch.”36 The clause “meant to alter” suggests to the audience that Dryden intended to rework the play, but in fact did not, because, the prologue claims, the play was too good to warrant alteration. Why would the prologue make reference to a prior intention to “alter” the play if the playwright had (supposedly) not done so? Why not simply present the play as old? A possible answer is that the Duke’s Company and / or Dryden had decided on a two-part marketing strategy whereby the play would be billed as new or altered in order to attract more patrons, before having its “newness,” and any resulting expectations of political content, downplayed in the prologue.37 As argued below, it is likely that the playwrights, and, by extension, the actors delivering the prologues, disingenuously promoted Shakespeare alterations as old, unaltered, and Shakespearean in a bid to appease potential censors. The prologue to Tate’s King Lear also suggests that a two-part marketing strategy may have been used to sell the play. The prologue states that Since by Mistakes your best Delights are made, (For ev’n your Wives can please in Masquerade) ’Twere worth our While t’have drawn you in this day By a new Name to our old honest Play; But he that did this Evenings Treat prepare Bluntly resolv’d before-hand to declare Your Entertainment should be most old Fare. Yet hopes, since in rich Shakespear’s soil it grew, ’Twill relish yet with those whose Tasts are True, And his Ambition is to please a Few. ............................... Why shou’d these Scenes lie hid, in which we find What may at Once divert and teach the Mind? Morals were alwaies proper for the Stage, But are ev’n necessary in this Age. Poets must take the Churches Teaching Trade, Since Priests their Province of Intrigue invade.38
The question of what title (“Name”) the playbill contained hinges on how far in advance the playwright resolved to declare that this was (supposedly) an old play. The line “’Twere worth our While” could be read as a hypothetical
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statement that it would have been worth tricking audiences into attending an old play masquerading as a new play, but I am more inclined to interpret the line as a confession that the company or playwright have indeed used a new play title in order to lure crowds. This is followed by a disclaimer: the person who prepared the play for the stage had always planned to tell audiences the “truth” about the play’s status (as supposedly old and apolitical) once they got to the theaters. The audience is to believe that the use of a new title was for their own good: despite it being an old play, they will enjoy it and it contains a good moral. Billing the play as old would have discouraged them from attending the theater and thus have caused them to miss out on a treat. The prologue may refer to a “Mistake,” but the emphasis is on the resulting “delights” for the audience, the play’s merits, its status as an old play, and the playwright and playhouse’s desire to please their customers. The reference in Tate’s prologue to the play receiving a new name also raises a number of interesting marketing possibilities, particularly as there is evidence to indicate that the title of another of his alterations, Richard the Second may have been modified at some point in its early print and performance history. The decision not to bill Tate’s alteration under the name “King Lear” could be linked to the fact that, unlike the majority of the Shakespeare plays altered during the Exclusion Crisis, King Lear had been staged in the 1670s. Audiences may therefore have recognized Lear as a mere revival, whence the need to change the play’s title. We also find reference to Tate’s banned play, Richard the Second, as both The Sicilian Usurper and The Tyrant of Sicily.39 The play is printed with the first two titles on its front page, and Tate refers to it by these same names in his preface, while the Newdigate newsletters state that the “Poet” of a banned play called “King Richard ye 2d . . . put the name Tyrant of Sicily upon it by which means it was acted twice this weeke.”40 It may also be noted that Tate’s alterations of Eastward Ho! and Trappolin Creduto Principe: or, Trappolin Supposed a Prince were given new titles: Cuckolds-Haven, or, An alderman no conjurer, and A Duke and No Duke, respectively.41 These examples thus appear to confirm that Tate, and the playhouses for which he wrote, were more than willing to change play titles in order to dupe theatergoers and censors. Novak posits that Dryden’s “preferred title” for the play now known as Troilus and Cressida may have been its subtitle, Truth found too late, and there is evidence to suggest that his play title was also altered at some stage.42 The Stationers’ Register shows that “one booke or coppy entituled Truth found too late, a tragedy, acted at the Duke’s Theatre. Written by Mr John Dryden” was registered to Abel Swalle and Jacob Tonson on 14 April 1679.43 Dryden’s preface “the Grounds of Criticisme in tragedy” was also
SHAKESPEARE ALTERATIONS
entered to Swalle and Tonson on 18 June 1679. However, when the play and the preface were listed together in the Term Catalogues the collective title reflected that found on the printed title page: Troilus and Cressida, or Truth found too late. A Tragedy, as it is acted at the Duke’s Theatre. To which is prefixed, A Preface containing the grounds of Criticism in Tragedy. By John Dryden . . . Printed for A. Swalle at the Unicorn in St. Paul’s Churchyard and J. Tonson, at the Judge’s Head in Chancery Lane44
It therefore seems distinctly possible that, like Tate’s plays, Dryden’s play was also originally billed under an unfamiliar and thus novel (not to mention ironic) name: “Truth Found Too Late.” Dryden did not simply use Shakespeare’s name to sell his play on stage, but also used the man himself—or at least a posthumous representation of him—to persuade the audience of the play’s age and merits. Dryden’s Shakespeare-ghost prologue, embodied by the actor Thomas Betterton, refers to the play to be performed (i.e., Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida) as his own (i.e., Shakespeare’s) “play,” before telling the audience to sit back and silently enjoy his “faithfull Scene,” taken “from true records [of] How Trojan valour did the Greek excel.” The audience are to take the play as Shakespeare’s and as belonging, like Banks’s The Destruction of Troy and Crowne’s Thyestes, to the distant past: Shakespeare “created first the Stage” and the play is based on historical records. The Shakespeare brand name is associated with national pride through the notion of London as Troynovant, with the ghost, who addresses the audience as his “lov’d Britons,” claiming to have “drain’d no Greek or Latin store” because “Like fruitfull Britain, rich without supply, / [he] on foreign trade needed not rely.”45 As Michael Dobson has noted, “this is the first of Shakespeare’s many posthumous personal appearances on stage, the first of many occasions on which he [becomes] a dramatic character in order to authorize the revival of one of his plays.”46 Dryden’s prologue ghost thus offers another example of the ways in which Exclusion Crisis alterations helped to revolutionize Restoration Londoners’ knowledge of Shakespeare and his plays. The emphasis on Shakespeare’s authorship and the downplaying of modifications to the source play found in the prologues to Dryden’ Troilus and Cressida and Tate’s King Lear are also found in the majority of the Shakespeare alterations performed between 1678 and 1682. In other words, in the prologues they were generally sold as Shakespeare’s plays rather than as radical alterations or new plays. As Table 1 shows, Thomas Shadwell, Edward Ravenscroft, Thomas Otway, and Crowne also made reference to their plays’ debt to Shakespeare. Ravenscroft announces that “Shakespeare by him reviv’d now treads the Stage,”47 just as Tate refers to himself as merely
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the “Play’s Reviver” in the epilogue to his alteration of King Lear, where he echoes Dryden’s emphasis on Shakespeare’s “Master-Touches.”48 Henry the Sixth’s prologue portrays Crowne as simply “he who this good old play did mend,” before announcing that the actors today bring “old gather’d Herbs [from] sweet Shakespears Garden.” The prologue to Shadwell’s Timon announces that the poet “no one line submits” to the critics before implying that the play is the work of “Old English Shakespeare.” And Otway insists that he has “rifled [Shakespeare] of half a play.”49 The emphasis on novelty, and the attempts to disguise a play’s age or Shakespearean origins found in playbill advertisements has clearly been replaced by a desire to do the opposite: the prologues and epilogues tend to foreground the play’s age, its lack of new (especially political) material, and its status as Shakespearean. The company or playwright’s decision to advertise these plays as old and Shakespearean once they had enticed audiences to the theater was, I believe, the result of marketing strategies and a desire to make money rather than fears over plagiarism. Laura Rosenthal and Paulina Kewes have identified what they see as an anxiety over plagiarism in the discussions of textual property found in Shakespeare alterations and late seventeenth-century drama generally. Concerning Tate’s alteration of King Lear, Rosenthal states that he “represented his use of Shakespeare as an ethical relationship between two authors,” since “clearly it had become important to recognize Shakespeare in particular as the precursor instead of simply offering one more retelling of a very old story.”50 Kewes in turn identifies what she sees as “growing pressure on late seventeenth-century dramatists to acknowledge and thoroughly to rework their sources,” adding that it was “a moral as much as an aesthetic injunction.”51 This does not, however, account for the theatrical paratexts of Shakespeare alterations of the Exclusion Crisis, where it is frequently claimed that Shakespeare has not been radically altered, thus overshadowing the altering playwrights. It seems particularly unlikely that Dryden would have been concerned by accusations of plagiarism. After all, he is not justifying his use of Shakespeare: the prologue gives Shakespeare credit for both the source play and Dryden’s alterations. The prologue states that Dryden did not “touch” Shakespeare’s play, but he in fact made extensive changes.52 For example, the play now features a series of anti-Catholic jibes, and a Cressida who is not false but wrongly accused. Indeed, her suicide at Troilus’s feet exposes the “Truth Found Too Late,” i.e., her innocence. Dryden is clearly being disingenuous in the prologue. Besides, the only way Dryden’s audience could have contested his claims to either novelty or Shakespearean authenticity would have been through intimate acquaintance with Shakespeare’s
SHAKESPEARE ALTERATIONS
play, which few spectators are likely to have had given that the play had not appeared in a single-play edition since 1609 and was otherwise only available in the expensive folio editions of Shakespeare’s dramatic works. The evidence thus suggests that Dryden’s prologue represented the play as Shakespeare’s not because he feared accusations of plagiarism but because he and his collaborators at the Duke’s Theatre wanted to appease censors and maximize profit. I have argued that Tate and Dryden established links between prologue and playbill. There is evidence to suggest that such links were quite common. For example, the prologue to Arviragus and Philicia announces “a new Play” as “promis’d . . . by our bill,” and Sir Samuel Tuke’s The Adventures of Five Hours (1663) features an initial stage direction announcing that the “Prologue Enters with a Play-Bill in his hand, and Reads: ‘This Day being the 15th of December, shall be Acted a New Play, never Plai’d before, call’d The Adventures of Five Hours.’”53 However, unlike Tate’s prologue to King Lear, Tuke’s prologue confirms what has been claimed in the playbill. Having read the bill, the prologue announces that “Th’are i’the right, for I dare boldly say, / The English Stage n’er had so New a Play; / The Dress, the Author, and the Scenes are New.”54 The fact that the prologue is used to confirm the playbill’s claims leads me to suspect that false advertising was a concern during the Restoration. It is perhaps telling that, unlike Tate and Dryden’s playbills, Tuke’s “honest” bill was used in far more prosperous times, soon after the theaters reopened. It was not used at a time when political crisis and theatrical recession were threatening to ruin both companies. That false advertising in playbills was common is indicated in a contemporary jest book, entitled Versatile Ingenium, The Wittie Companion, or Jests of all Sorts (1679). Here we are told about a man who, “Seeing in a play-bill upon a post, A great man gull’d, and underneath, By his Majesties Servants, read it thus, A great many gull’d by his Majesties Servants; adding to it these words: By my soul as true a thing as ever was writ.”55 The joke surely would not have worked if the playhouses and their bills had not gained a reputation for misleading patrons. Gerard Langbaine’s Momus Triumphans: or, The Plagiaries of the English Stage (1687), an early consumer manual of sorts, offers further evidence that disingenuous marketing occurred regularly in the late seventeenth century. According to Langbaine, Restoration false advertising was not exceptional but rather the “custom” of “crafty Booksellers” and “the Theatres.”56 Concerning the changing play titles discussed above, Langbaine is “uncomfortably aware” that “the altered titles displayed on playbills and title-pages create the spurious sense of novelty that helps to draw audiences
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and readers.”57 He therefore catalogues virtually every piece of theatrical entertainment and promises his readers details of “the Names of their Known and Supposed Authors,” the number of editions and volumes in existence, and “the Various Originals . . . from whence most of [the named authors] have Stole their Plots.” Langbaine states that his primary reason for producing Momus Triumphans was to “prevent” consumers from being “impos’d on” by booksellers and theaters who “Vent old Plays with new Titles,” and theaters which “dupe the Town, by acting old Plays under new Names, as if newly writ, and never acted before.”58 As Kewes has argued, following the publication of Langbaine’s text, a “prospective buyer would be in a position to verify the novelty of the offer” made on a playbill or title page “by consulting the catalogue before the purchase of a playbook or theatre ticket.”59 However, Exclusion Crisis consumers had no such resource: Momus Triumphans was not published until 1687. That there was a market for a text like Langbaine’s illustrates the fact that false advertising had become a serious concern by the late 1680s. The evidence from Langbaine therefore corroborates my suspicion that the Shakespeare alterations were initially billed as new, rather than old or derivative, in order to attract spectators. The emphasis on novelty found on the playbills is also found in the majority of the printed playbooks, where the prologues’ attempts to foreground a lack of originality and overstate Shakespeare’s claim to the altered plays is seemingly reversed. Observe, for example, the print versions of the alterations (see Table 1 in Appendix). Nine of the ten plays featured titlepage attributions that promote the plays as the products of the altering playwright’s labor with no mention of Shakespeare. Only one of these title pages (that of Tate’s Lear) makes reference to “alteration” or the possibility of a source text. The rest present the texts as (presumably) new plays. The drive to rebrand these plays as the work of the altering playwrights, rather than that of Shakespeare, is continued in the prefaces and dedications that accompanied them into print. While pre-1677 alterations tended to silently appropriate Shakespeare’s works, both in performance and print, Exclusion Crisis alterations used printed playbooks as a means of modifying prologue claims. A number of reversals can be observed between prologue and playbook, with Crowne, for example, announcing that he lied: “I call’d it in the Prologue Shakespeare’s Play, though he has no Title to the 40th part of it.” He claims that he presented his play as Shakespearean in a bid “to support it on the Stage,”60 thereby suggesting that censorship rather than reverence or concerns over plagiarism motivated his marketing policy. Having denied his input in the prologue to his play, Dryden uses his dedication to detail the changes he introduced while citing the Greek and Roman sources on
SHAKESPEARE ALTERATIONS
which Shakespeare did “rely.”61 Tate follows suit in the dedication to his Lear where, no longer a mere “reviver,” he lists the major changes he has wrought to the play’s plot and characters, Ravenscroft highlights “entirely New” scenes and additions to the plot of his Titus, and Shadwell insists that he has worked Shakespeare’s “strokes [into] a Play.”62 The printed playbooks were therefore sold as alterations, or as new plays, produced by contemporary playwrights, in stark contrast with the stage performances, which were accompanied with prologues and epilogues that foregrounded the plays’ age and Shakespearean origins. While stage censorship looks, as I have claimed, to have impacted the decision to sell the alterations as Shakespeare’s when presented onstage, the same is not true of print editions. As I have argued elsewhere, the volte-face found in the playbooks is probably linked to the fact that the Licensing Act governing printed material lapsed in 1679.63 In fact, it lapsed as a direct result of the Crisis; Charles closed Parliament in order to prevent it from introducing legislation to bar his brother from the succession, but this simultaneously prevented a number of other acts from being renewed.64 It may therefore be argued that the extent to which Shakespeare’s name was used to sell altered versions of his plays was influenced by the unique set of censorship circumstances ushered in during the Crisis. The plays were advertised as new, then as old, and then as new once more, with Shakespeare’s authorial claim exaggerated on stage and understated in print. It also appears that Langbaine’s concerns about “crafty booksellers” were as justified as his suspicions about duplicitous theaters. The picture that emerges from a survey of the strategies used to sell Shakespeare alterations of the late 1670s and early 1680s is arguably that of a sophisticated marketing machine capable of adapting to the period’s fluctuating censorship conditions. The Exclusion Crisis witnessed a momentous juncture in Shakespeare’s authorial afterlife, when his plays dominated the new plays repertory and his name was repeatedly promoted to audiences via prologues delivered on stage. The period witnessed his transformation from a little-noted writer to an author whose works were altered and staged with unrivalled frequency and whose name was accorded great prominence as it echoed through the two licensed theaters of Restoration London. The perceived market for Shakespeare alterations is arguably explained by the topicality of his plays and the impact the Crisis had on the theater market. Shakespeare was not cited or used to sell because his reputation had increased. Rather, it might be said that his reputation increased, and interest in his works revived, because of the unique cultural and political constellation of the Exclusion Crisis. I have argued that Shakespeare’s increased eminence from 1678 was
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by no means inevitable, and that it was due to a unique set of circumstances that seriously affected the playwrights and theaters’ ability to make money. These circumstances, which include tight stage censorship, theatrical recession, and a demand for political plays, made alteration of a preexisting playwright’s work, and Shakespeare’s work in particular, an appealing and economically viable option. They also made Shakespeare’s name a useful weapon for prologue writers. The inconsistent treatment his authorship is given in advertising performances and playbooks respectively suggests that Shakespeare’s name was used to shield rather than sell. However, reaching mass audiences at a particularly conflicted moment in history, the Exclusion Crisis alterations nonetheless had a powerful impact on contemporary configurations of Shakespeare’s authorship. They also offer important insight into the strategies playwrights, theaters, and publishers used to sell dramatic texts on the late seventeenth-century stage and page.
University of Geneva
Likely Premiere65
1662
1662
1664
1664
1667
1667
Title
The Law Against Lovers (Ado & MM)
Romeo and Juliet
The Rivals (The Two Noble Kinsmen)
Macbeth, A Tragedy
Sauny the Scot, or The Taming of the Shrew
The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island
Printed in Davenant’s Works
Not Extant
None
None
“Written by J. LACEY”
None
Playwright Title Page Attribution
Duke’s
King’s
Duke’s
Duke’s
Duke’s
Duke’s
Performance by
1670
1698
1674
J. M. for Henry Herringman
Printed and Sold by E. Whitlock
For A. Clark For P. Chetwin
For William Cademan
Not extant
Not extant
1668
T. N. for Henry Herringman
Printed by/for
1673
First Printed
Table 1. Shakespeare Alterations, 1660–82
APPENDIX
Yes
No
No
No
Not extant
No
Reference to Shakespeare in Printed Dramatic Paratexts
Yes
No
No
No
Not extant
No
Reference to Shakespeare in Printed Readerly Paratexts
SHAKESPEARE ALTERATIONS 321
January 1678
Autumn 1679
April 1679
October 1679
January / February 1680
Timon of Athens, or The ManHater
Titus Andronicus, or The Rape of Lavinia
Troilus and Cressida, or Truth Found Too Late
The History and Fall of Caius Marius (Romeo and Juliet)
The Misery of Civil-War (2 & 3 Henry VI)
“Alter’d from Mr SHAKESPEARS Works, By Mr. Edw Ravenscroft”
“Written By JOHN DRYDEN Servant to his Majesty”
“By Thomas Otway”
“Written By CROWN”
“Made into a PLAY. By THO. SHADWELL”
Likely Premiere65
Title
Playwright Title Page Attribution
“As it is Acted at the DUKE’s Theatre”
“As it is acted at the Duke’s Theatre”
“As it is acted at the Duke’s Theatre”
“Acted at the Theatre Royall” (King’s)
“As it is acted at the DUKES THEATRE”
Performance by
1680
1680
1679
1687
1678
First Printed
Table 1. (cont.)
For R. Bentley and M. Magnes
For Tho. Flesher
For Able Swall and Jacob Tonson
J. B. for J. Hindmarsh
J. M. for Henry Herringman
Printed by/for
Prologue states that “the Divine Shakespar did not lay one stone”
Prologue
No dedication or address
No
Yes
Yes
Surviving section of original prologue (quoted in Langbaine) cites Shakespeare Prologue
Yes
Reference to Shakespeare in Printed Readerly Paratexts
Prologue & Epilogue
Reference to Shakespeare in Printed Dramatic Paratexts
322 EMMA LESLEY DEPLEDGE
Likely Premiere65
December 1680 / January 1681
Autumn 1680 / January 1681
Autumn 1680 / Spring 1681
December 1681
March 1682
Title
The History of Richard II The Sicilian Usurper
The History of King Lear
Henry the Sixth, the First Part, with the Murder of Humphrey Duke of Glocester (2 Henry VI)
The Ingratitude of a Commonwealth, or the Fall of Caius Martius Coriolanus
The Injured Princess, or the Fatal Wager (Cymbeline)
Playwright Title Page Attribution
“By N. TATE”
“Reviv’d with Alterations By N. Tate”
“Written By Mr. CROWN”
“By N. Tate”
“By Tho. Durfey, Gent”
“As it was Acted at the TheaterRoyal” (King’s)
“As it is ACTED AT THE Theatre-Royal” (King’s)
“As it was Acted at the Dukes Theatre”
1682
1682
1681
1681
1681
“Acted at the THEATRE ROYAL, Under the Name of the Sicilian Usurper” (King’s) “Acted at the Duke’s Theatre”
First Printed
Performance by
Table 1. (cont.)
For R. Bentley and M. Magnes
L. M. for Joseph Hindmarsh
No
Prologue
Prologue & Epilogue
Prologue & Epilogue
For T. Flesher to be sold by R. Bentley & M. Magnes
For R. Bentley and M. Magnes
No
Reference to Shakespeare in Printed Dramatic Paratexts
For Richard Tonson & Jacob Tonson
Printed by/for
No dedication or address
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Reference to Shakespeare in Printed Readerly Paratexts
SHAKESPEARE ALTERATIONS 323
No
Written by William Shakespear, and William Rowley “Mr. William Shakespeares”
“Mr. William Shakespear’s”
None “BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE”
THE BIRTH OF MERLIN OR, The Childe hath found its Father. As it hath been several times Acted with great Applause
Mr. William Shakespeares comedies, histories, and tragedies. Published according to the true original copies. The third impression. (The Third Folio, first issue, F3a)
Mr. William Shakespeare’s comedies, histories, and tragedies. Published according to the true original copies. The third impression. And unto this impression is added seven playes, never before printed in folio. Viz. Pericles Prince of Tyre. The London Prodigall. The history of Thomas Ld. Cromwell. Sir John Oldcastle Lord Cobham. The Puritan Widow. A York-shire tragedy. The tragedy of Locrine. (The Third Folio, second issue, F3b)
Macbeth: A TRAGEDY. ACTED At the DUKES-THEATRE
THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET Prince of Denmark. As it is now Acted at his Highness the Duke of York’s Theatre. (2 editions)
1662
1663
1664
1673
1676
No
No
Yes—paratexts reprinted from F1 and F2
Yes—paratexts reprinted from F1 and F2
Reference to Shakespeare Elsewhere in Text
Title Page Attribution
Title
Date
Table 2. Shakespeare in Print, 1660–77
London: By Andr. Clark, for J. Martyn, and H. Herringmann
London: for William Cademan
London: for P[hilip]. C[hetwinde]
London: for Philip Chetwinde
London: Printed by Tho. Johnson for Francis Kirkman, and Henry Marsh
Imprint
324 EMMA LESLEY DEPLEDGE
SHAKESPEARE ALTERATIONS
Table 3. Performance and Publication History of Shakespeare Plays Altered, 1678–82 Most Recent Single Play Edition66
Last Printed
Last Recorded Post1660 Performance
Timon of Athens
N/A
F3 (1663/4)
N/A
Titus Andronicus
1611
F3 (1663/4)
N/A
Romeo and Juliet
1637
F3 (1663/4)
1662
Troilus and Cressida
1609
F3 (1663/4)
N/A
Richard II
1634
F3 (1663/4)
N/A
King Lear
1655
F3 (1663/4)
1675
Henry VI, Parts 2&3
As a single playbook (Pavier), The Whole Contention, 1619; individually, 1600
F3 (1663/4)
N/A
Coriolanus
N/A
F3 (1663/4)
N/A
Cymbeline
N/A
F3 (1663/4)
N/A
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EMMA LESLEY DEPLEDGE
NOTES 1
I use the term “alteration” in place of the more familiar “adaptation” in order to reflect contemporary usage. For more on seventeenth-century play terminology, see Laura J. Rosenthal, “(Re)Writing Lear: Literary Property and Dramatic Authorship,” Early Modern Conceptions of Property, ed. John Brewer and Susan Staves (London: Routledge, 1994), 323.
2
This figure is based on nine Shakespeare alterations premiering alongside about fortyeight other new plays during the theatrical seasons spanning fall 1678 and summer 1682. For details of the performance calendar for these seasons see Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, “Dating Play Premières from Publication Data, 1660–1700,” Harvard Library Bulletin 22 (1974): 374–405; Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, “Lost English Plays, 1660–1700,” Harvard Library Bulletin 25 (1977): 5–33; Susan J. Owen, Restoration Theatre and Crisis (Oxford Clarendon, 1996), 300–2; and William Van Lennep et al., eds., The London Stage, 1660–1800, Part One: 1660–1700, 5 parts, 11 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois U. Press, 1960–68), vol. 1.
3
For more on the Exclusion Crisis, see Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration to the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge U. Press, 1987); James Rees Jones, The First Whigs: The Politics of the Exclusion Crisis, 1678–1683 (Oxford U. Press, 1961); and Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–1683 (Cambridge U. Press, 1991).
4
Barbara A. Murray, “Performance and Publication of Shakespeare, 1660–1682: ‘Go see them play’d, then read them as before,’” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 102 (2001): 435–49, notes a discrepancy between they ways in which Shakespeare was presented to audiences (positively) and readers (negatively) but more work on the distinctions between pre- and post-1677 alterations and the contrary ways in which Shakespeare’s name was used to sell plays in performance and print is required.
5
Examples include Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism, 1730–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparartus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Don-John Dugas, Marketing the Bard: Shakespeare in Performance and Print, 1660–1740 (U. of Missouri Press, 2006); Robert D. Hume, “Before the Bard: ‘Shakespeare’ in Early Eighteenth-Century London,” ELH 64 (1997): 41–75; Jean I. Marsden, The Re-Imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory (U. Press of Kentucky, 1995); Jean I. Marsden, ed., The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991); Barbara A. Murray, Restoration Shakespeare: Viewing the Voice (London: Associated U. Presses, 2001); Mongi Raddadi, Davenant’s Adaptations of Shakespeare (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1979); Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1989); and Katherine West Scheil, The Taste of the Town: Shakespearean Comedy and the Early Eighteenth-Century Theatre (Lewisburg: Bucknell U. Press, 2003).
6 Dugas, Marketing the Bard, and Hume, “Before the Bard.” 7 Dugas, Marketing the Bard, 24.
SHAKESPEARE ALTERATIONS 8
See Robert D. Hume, Dryden’s Criticism (Cornell U. Press, 1970).
9
See Milhous and Hume, “Lost English Plays,” and Van Lennep, London Stage, pt. 1.
10 Milhous and Hume, “Lost English Plays.” I recognize the fact that performance records for the period are limited, and that an absence of records need not mean that performances did not take place. 11 Dugas, Marketing the Bard, 44. 12 Dugas, Marketing the Bard, 47. For discussion of the deliberate omission of prologues in which Shakespeare may have been cited see Emma Depledge, “Authorship and Alteration: Shakespeare on the Exclusion Crisis Stage and Page, 1678–1682,” SPELL (Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature), special issue on Medieval and Early Modern Authorship, ed. Guillemette Bolens and Lukas Erne (Tübingen: Narr, 2011), 208; and Paulina Kewes, Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660–1710 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 71. 13 Elkanah Settle, Epistle Dedicatory to Fatal Love (London, 1680), A2v. 14 See Kewes, Authorship and Appropriation, 18, who adds that there was little difference between attached and unattached playwrights beyond “the cash retainer,” as “members of both of them composed uncommissioned scripts. And, as the few recorded instances of commissions for plays demonstrate, the company which issued the commission felt in no way compelled to bestow it on a house playwright.” 15 Robert D. Hume, “The Economics of Culture in London, 1660–1740,” Huntington Library Quarterly 69 (2006): 501. 16 Leslie Hotson, The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 267. 17 “Introduction,” London Stage, pt. 1, lxx. 18 James Gray, cited in Hotson, Commonwealth and Restoration Stage, 267. 19 See Robert D. Hume, Development of English Drama (Oxford U. Press, 1976), 341; Allardyce Nicoll, A History of Restoration Drama, 1660–1700 (Cambridge U. Press, 1923), 296; and George W. Whitingsource, “The Condition of the London Theatres, 1679–83: A Reflection of the Political Situation,” MP 25 (1927): 195–206. 20 John Crowne, Henry the Sixth, the First Part (London, 1681), A2r; Thomas Shadwell, A True Widow (London, 1679), A2r. 21 Aphra Behn, The Feigned Curtizans (London, 1679), A4r. 22 Gunnar Sorelius, “The Giant Race Before the Flood”: Pre-Restoration Drama on the Stage and in the Criticism of the Restoration (Upsaala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1966), 188, has also argued that “adaptation . . . supplied an opportunity for the critic of contemporary politics to hide behind the authority of the old dramatist,” while Dobson, Making of the National Poet, 73, notes that “Shakespeare was promoted as an author supposedly above
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EMMA LESLEY DEPLEDGE and beyond contemporary politics—as a way of creating a space of sanctuary around” political alterations. 23 Calhoun Winton, “Dramatic Censorship,” The London Theatre World, 1660–1800, ed. Robert D. Hume (Carbondale: Southern Illinois U. Press, 1980), 288. 24 For an excellent overview of Restoration stage censorship, see Matthew Kinservik, “Theatrical Regulation during the Restoration Period,” A Companion to Restoration Drama, ed. Susan J. Owen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 36–52; Janet Clare, “‘All Run Now into Politicks’: Dramatic Censorship during the Exclusion Crisis, 1678–82,” Writing and Censorship in Britain, ed. Neil Sammells and Paul Hyland (London: Routledge, 1992), 46–59; Owen, Restoration Theatre and Crisis, 11–13; Winton, “Dramatic Censorship,” 286–308; Arthur White, “The Office of Revels and Dramatic Censorship During the Restoration Period,” Western Reserve University Bulletin 34 (1931): 5–45. 25 The Works of John Dryden, ed. E. N. Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, 20 vols. (U. of California Press, 1956–2002), 13:500. 26 John Banks, The Destruction of Troy (London, 1679), A4r. Elliott Visconsi, “Trojan Originalism: Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida,” The Age of Projects, ed. Maximillian E. Novak (U. of Toronto Press, 2008), 75, identifies a “‘Trojan moment’ on the London stage” during the Exclusion Crisis, adding that Banks’s play “might have been accordingly titled ‘The Destruction of Troynovant.’” 27 John Crowne, Thyestes (London, 1681), A4r. 28 The theatrical seasons of the Exclusion Crisis drew heavily on alterations of existing texts; the source texts consulted can be loosely classified as classical, French (often based on English translations thereof), and as derived from the works of pre-1642 writers. 29 I recognize that Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens and Titus Andronicus are now jointly attributed to Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton and Shakespeare and George Peele respectively. This acknowledgement is implied in each subsequent reference to the plays as “Shakespeare’s.” See Brian Vickers, Shakespeare Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford U. Press, 2002). 30 Edmund Bohun is here citing (and then refuting) claims made in a previous tract. See Bohun’s Reflections on a Pamphlet Stiled, A Just and Modest Vindication of the Proceedings of the last two Parliaments (London, 1683), J4r. 31 From the catalogue appended (hence new signatures) to Tom Tyler, A1r. 32 Nahum Tate, Brutus of Alba: or, The Enchanted Lovers (London, 1678), A4r. 33 Scouten and Avery, “Introduction,” London Stage, pt. 1, lxx, make reference to the Duke’s Company having considered Abraham Cowley’s The Cutter of Coleman Street a “new play,” even though it was “altered from The Guardian.” 34 Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge U. Press, 2009), 58.
SHAKESPEARE ALTERATIONS 35 William J. Lawrence, The Elizabethan Playhouse and Other Studies, 2 vols. (Stratfordupon-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1912), 2:241, suggests that “handbills” were likely also used during the post-1660 period. 36 John Dryden, Troilus and Cressida (London, 1679), B4r. 37 I am here defining “old,” “new,” and “altered” plays based on what audiences or readers were told about a play’s status. For most Restoration theatergoers, “adaptations of unknown old plays were simply new plays,” and, as Michael Dobson, “Adaptations and Revivals,” The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre, ed. Deborah Payne Fisk (Cambridge U. Press, 2000), 47, sagely adds, “whether we now categorize a Renaissance adaptation as such or as a Restoration play in its own right tends simply to reflect our own sense of the relative importance of the two writers involved.” 38 Nahum Tate, The History of King Lear (London, 1681), A4r. 39 On the censorship of Tate’s Richard II, see especially Odai Johnson, “Empty Houses: The Suppression of Tate’s Richard II,” Theatre Journal 47 (1995): 503–16; and Timothy Viator, “Nahum Tate’s Richard II,” Theatre Notebook 42 (1988): 109–17. 40 See London Stage, part 1, 293–94; and Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, A Register of English Theatrical Documents, 1660–1714, 2 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois U. Press, 1991), vol. 1, entry 1118, 218. 41 Both alterations were published in London in 1685. 42 Dryden, Works, 13:497. 43 Edward Arber, ed., The Term Catalogues, 1668–1709, 3 vols. (London: Privately Printed, 1903–6), 1:370–71. 44 Dryden, Works, 13:497; Term Catalogues, 1:370–71. 45 Dryden, Troilus and Cressida, B4r. 46 Dobson, Making of the National Poet, 74. 47 Ravenscroft’s prologue was not printed with the 1687 edition of his Titus Andronicus, or The Rape of Lavinia, but Gerard Langbaine prints a section of the prologue he claims was used on stage in his Account of the English Dramatick Poets (Oxford, 1691), Glr. 48 Tate, King Lear, K2v. 49 Crowne, Henry the Sixth, A2r; Thomas Shadwell, Timon of Athens (London, 1678), A4r; Thomas Otway, The History and Fall of Caius Marius (London, 1680), A3r. 50 Rosenthal, “(Re)Writing Lear,” 238. 51 Kewes, Authorship and Appropriation, 5.
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EMMA LESLEY DEPLEDGE 52 Dryden, Troilus and Cressida, B4r. 53 I am indebted to Stern, Documents of Performance, 58, for the first example. Samuel Tuke, The Adventures of Five Hours (London, 1663), A3r. 54 Tuke, Adventures of Five Hours, A3r. 55 Versatile Ingenium (London, 1674), C3v. 56 Gerard Langbaine, Momus Triumphans: or, The Plagiaries of the English Stage (London, 1687), A4r. 57 Kewes, Authorship and Appropriation, 106. 58 Langbaine, Momus Triumphans, A1r, A4r . 59 Kewes, Authorship and Appropriation, 105. Also see Kewes, “Gerard Langbaine’s ‘View of Plagiaries’: The Rhetoric of Dramatic Appropriation in the Restoration,” RES 48 (1997): 2–18; and Kevin Pask, “Plagiarism and the Originality of National Literature: Gerard Langbaine,” ELH 69 (2002): 727–47. 60 Crowne, Henry the Sixth, A3v. 61 Dryden, Troilus and Cressida, A4v. 62 Tate, King Lear, A2r–A3r; Edward Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, or, The Rape of Lavinia (London, 1687), A2r; Shadwell, Timon of Athens, A3r. 63 Depledge, “Authorship and Alteration,” 207. 64 See Owen, Restoration Theatre and Crisis, 159–60. 65 Premier dates based on Hume and Milhous, and Owen’s modifications to those proposed in Van Lennep, London Stage, vol. 1. See Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, “Dating Play Premières from Publication Data, 1660–1700,” Harvard Library Bulletin 22 (1974): 374–405, and “Lost English Plays, 1660–1700,” Harvard Library Bulletin 25 (1977): 5–33; and Susan J. Owen, Restoration Theatre and Crisis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 300–2. 66 Information taken from Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge U. Press, 2003); and The English Short Title Catalogue (http://estc.bl.uk).
Book Reviews Anamorphosis in Early Modern Literature: Mediation and Affect by Jen E. Boyle. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. Pp. viii + 165. $89.95. The topic of anamorphosis, a form of visual perspective used to create hidden images that can be found only by viewers’ active manipulation or concentration, is a fascinating one. The brave art historian Lyle Massey has recently tackled contextualizing its nascence in Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies: Anamorphosis in Early Modern Theories of Perspective (Pennsylvania State U. Press, 2007). In that work, my willingness to follow the somewhat unsystematic organization of material was regularly rewarded, although I was left with some lingering and some new questions. That is to say, the provocative topic is indeed difficult to discuss cogently; hence my unexcited response to some parts of Jen Boyle’s Anamorphosis in Early Modern Literature: Mediation and Affect comes tempered with a ready acknowledgement of the difficulty of discussing this vastly important concept, and of coordinating it with the concepts of mediation and affect, as advertised in the subtitle. There is a mimetic quality of the rhetorical or presentational strategies of this book and its thesis: “at stake in my exploration of anamorphosis in early modern literature and technoscience is the intimate confusion of mediation via the technical interface and the methodologies of reading mediated bodies in and out of history” (7). The introduction positions its discussion in terms of Samuel Pepys’s early modern curiosity in optics (1), Jacques Lacan’s psychological interests (2), and Stephen Greenblatt’s cultural lens on Hans Holbein’s familiar The Ambassadors (3). And all this comes in just the first three pages. Boyle’s exploration also integrates primary materials. So much interfacing requires substantial mooring. On the one hand, Ashgate should be commended on its inclusion and placement of figures and illustrations; on the other hand, readers may be disappointed by the quality of some of the illustrations. On the one hand, Boyle’s passion for the subjects under review maintained my interest, which, on the other hand, wavered because of presentational choices. A good editor’s pen should have been taken to the excessive and distracting use of quotation marks used not for quotations but rather for un-cited quotations or for rhetorical emphasis. 331
332
ANGELICA DURAN REVIEW
Introductory chapters can be excused for packing in references to multidisciplinary considerations, as authors seeks to hook their readership. Here this maneuver left me at times frustrated rather than illuminated, and I retained my frustration in many of the subsequent chapters. Boyle’s multidisciplinary approach is at once this book’s greatest strength and weakness. She introduces a number of important considerations and disciplinary contexts but then does not lead her readers to possible applications or resolutions. An early representative example appears in chapter 1, in a two-page paragraph that starts by defining “the word anamorphosis, a Greek neologism” (18), refers quickly to Martin Kemp, lists “Dürer, Galileo, Lomazzo, and da Vinci” (19), references Ben Jonson, quotes Andrew Marvell, and then goes on for one more page. That said, the book has a number of strengths that, overall, made me glad to have read it. The book’s general organization demonstrates a care for introducing, arranging, and following the development of anamorphosis from the second half of the seventeenth century to the first part of the eighteenth, and with major figures familiar to readers. Each chapter has a few gems that can be mined from the encyclopedic coverage. Chapter 1 looks first to the popular genre of perspective manuals, then to specific ways that Lucy Hutchinson’s and Thomas Hobbes’s writings are in conversation with such works. Boyle aligns Robert Pricke’s Perspective Practical (1689) with Hutchinson’s translation of Lucretius’s De rerum naturum, composed in the 1650s. Boyle does a good job of treating the translation as translation, much in line with David Hopkins’s excellent chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (2007) on “The English Voices of Lucretius from Lucy Hutchinson to John Mason Good.” Milton is showcased in two chapters, one on “John Milton and the (New) Media Image: Affect and the Anamorphic Imaginary” and another on “The Observer in Milton’s Garden and the Body of Anamorphosis.” The first is strongest in its focus on Milton’s heated response in Eikonoclastes to the ghostwritten defense of Charles I, Eikon Basilke (1649), as articulating the fears attendant on the manipulability of perspective, through visual, rhetorical, and other presentational tricks. Certainly, the second chapter provides a new and valuable lens through which to read the difficult scene at the end of Paradise Lost book 2, the allegory of Satan, Sin, and Death. We can make sense of the “allegory in the midst of epic” (100) by noting how carefully Milton leads us into it what Boyle calls a “fade-in”: “Before the Gates there sat / On either side a formidable shape” (2.648–49). Her close reading of the subsequent scene cogently explains the passage as a verbal form of anamorpohosis and encourages readers to view the passage as a careful de-
ANAMORPHOSIS IN EARLY MODERN LITERATURE
stabilization of what they think they know about these figures. While Boyle respectfully cites a number of good readers of this scene—John Broadbent, William Empson, Roland Frye, and others—the best parts of Stanley Fish’s Surprised by Sin continually sprung to my mind in this section. A chapter on “Margaret Cavendish’s Double Perception: Affective Technics and Biopolitical Fictions” seems to follow on Milton’s articulation of the fears about the manipulability of perspectives of a present political reality to Cavendish’s imagining of implementing a new program for intellectual inquiry (82). The playful nature of anamorphosis is aligned with the playful narrative voice and characters that are the hallmark of Cavendish’s Blazing World. I am particularly interested in how Boyle’s thesis will affect my next reading of the tour de force layering of voice in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. With the fifth chapter, on “Projecting the Modern: New Perspectives, the Spaces of Nationalism and Anamorphic Territory,” Boyle shifts from the fantastical and divine settings of chapters 3, 4, and 5 to the more realistic but still distanced ones in Robinson Crusoe. Boyle aligns the thrilling anamorphic process of power and fear in Crusoe’s description of the “prospective glass” and of key scenes, such as Crusoe’s discovery of the footprints in the sand. Chapter 6, “Affect and Perceptual Technics in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year,” makes sense as a conclusion to the study as it focuses on a text whose setting was very realistic for its original readers. In the face of large-scale death, the ways in which “science and literature formed a conjunction in relationship to new technologies of perception amid theories of body and mind” (139) is given its due importance via its practical application. In this review, I have primarily focused on some of the chief strengths of each chapter. Readers will readily see, however, that Anamorphosis contains a number of word- and sentence-level errors, indicative most likely of too great attention to shortening production time. Some can be fixed quite simply, as with replacing the plural verb “exhibit” for the singular “exhibits” (33). Others require a bit more work. No doubt, Boyle errs when she designates “French Jesuit Niceron” (19), since he belonged to the Minim order. However, in Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford U. Press, 2003), Noel Malcolm importantly calls attention to the “role of religious orders . . . especially Jesuits and Minims” (209) to the development of anamorphosis, and notes “the credit given by Niceron to a Lyonnais Jesuit for his prior work” (214). So, correction and elaboration would work hand in hand to provide denotative accuracy and to nuance the global argument. Similarly, the misplaced comma in the following fragment is coupled with incorrectly designating Charles I’s execution rather than Eikon Basilike’s publication as “In February, 1649” (49).
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ALEXANDER PETTIT REVIEW
I have a sense that Anamorphosis could have been a great book with one more concerted—dare I say—revision, in both its meanings: reconceptualizing the best framing for the book, and spot-checking and fixing errors. The errata pages that were common in early modern British writings are no longer standard, even though errors persist. I am not advocating that we restore errata pages, but rather that we do something about the errors that readers note in current publications—such as in book reviews—with the new publishing practices now available to us, such as on-demand and electronic publishing, so that works like Anamorphosis can more fully make the contributions to scholarship that they aim to make. I myself have benefitted from book reviews that have called attention to errors: the paperback version of my Concise Companion to Milton (Wiley Blackwell, 2010) integrates all the changes I gleaned from my own (pained) detection of errors and those of others in the hardback edition (2007). Similarly, some journals now electronically post articles well in advance of their publication in material form, resulting in the practice of digital publication correction. With new modes of publication, we are getting closer to achieving the ultimate benefits that thinkers have envisioned since the scholarly societies of ancient Greece and China, to John Milton’s Areopagitican call for “much arguing, much writing, many opinions.”
Purdue University
Angelica Duran
My Friend Tom: The Poet-Playwright Tennessee Williams by William Jay Smith. U. Press of Mississippi, 2012. Pp. xxii + 173. $28. This slight but warm volume is the first account of Tennessee Williams written by a bona fide friend of long standing. Smith is a poet of steady reputation and awesome duration, still productive and worth reading at ninety-four. He has no interest in settling scores, and the clarity of his prose will register well with readers weary of the clangorous and twaddly rot of much academic writing. Whether or not My Friend Tom appreciably augments our understanding of Williams is another matter. We have not lacked information about the twenty-something St. Louisan in the mid- to late 1930s, the most sustained period of intercourse between him and Smith and the subject of the longest of Smith’s chapters. Williams’s mother and brother weighed in on the early
MY FRIEND TOM
adulthood of their famous relative in memoirs published in 1963 and 1983, respectively; the playwright’s own Memoirs of 1975 chronicles the period, albeit in the woozy and haphazard manner characteristic of that volume; and selections of Williams’s letters from the ages of eight to thirty-four appeared in 2000. Lyle Leverich’s 1995 biography of the young Williams is profuse in its coverage of the college years, in the company of Smith and otherwise. There is no shortage of insistently chummy memoirs by acquaintances of the mature playwright; and this pertains, as Smith somewhat awkwardly extends his study to the time of Williams’s death. A fluidity of text among Smith’s earlier work, Leverich’s biography, and the present volume compromises My Friend Tom from the outset. The “entire chapter” on St. Louis, Smith acknowledges, “is based on chapters 3‒13 of [Leverich], on which I collaborated intially and to which I have now made several additions” (158). Actually, some of the material had appeared in Smith’s memoir Army Brat (1980) and other sources before finding its way to Leverich, as a result of which the “new” book often seems too familiar. Smith’s addenda mostly concern Smith himself; and time and again a tendency to dwell on his own life, work, and other interests tugs the book from its stated purview. This problem is superevident in later chapters, for example in excursuses on Eudora Welty, and, bizarrely, in the illustrations, which include clever but irrelevant “typewriter portraits” by Smith of Ernest Hemingway, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Tallulah Bankhead. The short chapters that constitute the last two thirds of the book are a mixed bag. Engaging glimpses into Williams’s later life and astute if impressionistic readings cohabitate with prose (and verse) of uncertain purpose. Lacunae are sometimes filled by material from Donald Spoto’s unreliable 1985 biography, at cost to Smith’s ethos and, again, to the freshness of his book. Some of these chapters are remarkably diffuse. In “Williams and Frank Merlo: Florence, 1949,” Smith reproduces and glosses a letter that Williams wrote him in 1974, rehashes well-known material about Williams’s college girlfriend and his then inchoate homosexuality, provides a roll call of other famous writers who had visited him (Smith) and his wife in post-war Florence, notices Welty’s dislike of A Streetcar Named Desire, reproduces a large portion of Kenneth Tynan’s 1954 review of Streetcar and other plays, and ends with a bit on the apparent homosexuality of Welty’s beloved John Robinson. Interlarded are references to the titular visit during which Williams and his lover dined with the Smiths, listened while they read poetry postprandially, and, in the morning, visited a Fascist-era building that Williams “loved” (97). The get-together was obviously memorable to Smith, but his account of it seems unlikely to prove so to readers. A chap-
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ter about President Carter’s bestowal on Williams of a Medal of Freedom is hamstrung by Smith’s admission that “of what went on at the Williams table we have no report” (134). The memoirist on that occasion sat with Welty, who had impressed him by revealing that during the presentation proper “a fly had landed on Tennessee’s cheek and then had circled his head for several minutes” (133). Smith’s next paragraph begins thus: “I thought of the many houseflies that had pursued Tom in his long career . . .” (133). Ouch. Much of the book suffers from this lack of focus and enthusiasm for trivia, and the inclusion of long and frequently unreferenced quotations doesn’t help. But there are gems here, too, even if few of them sparkle for the length of a chapter. A discussion of Williams’s poetry is noteworthy both for treating that material seriously and for appraising it knowledgeably. Rather than making inflated claims for the verse, Smith documents Williams’s lifelong commitment to poetry and demonstrates his friend’s indebtedness to Sidney Lanier, Sara Teasdale, and Vachel Lindsay—predecessors less well remembered than Hart Crane, whom Williams habitually claimed as his inspiration. A firsthand account of the failed Boston tryout of Battle of Angels (1940) corrects Williams’s famous assertion that “an already antagonistic audience” had responded with “outraged squawks, gabbling, [and] spluttering” when excessively ardent smoke pots spewed out “great sulfurous billows” at play’s end (52‒53). Not quite, says Smith, who recalls “a period of total confusion” followed by “a great hush” and, when the female lead moved downstage for a bow, “a strong wave of applause” (53). The snapshot of Smith reading Donne to a depressed Williams after the show is affecting, although like the broader account of the evening will be familiar to readers of Leverich’s biography and Smith’s previous work (here, a 1984 entry in the American Dictionary of Literary Biography). Amid staler passages, the most illuminating portion of a chapter on a 1979 reading at Lynchburg College pathetically counterpoints Williams’s charm and his drunkenness, a juxtaposition that Williams had by then worked into a set piece for audiences of callow acolytes. And in the clearer moments of his chapter on Williams’s underrated Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980), Smith points up the biographical pertinence of Williams’s representation of Zelda Fitzgerald, for example by noticing the playwright’s Zelda-like desire “to escape into both madness and creation” (130). Given how little has been written about Clothes for a Summer Hotel, the analysis should constitute an immediately useful contribution to the emergent discussion of Williams’s late drama. The most provocative chapter concerns a 1966 performance of JeanClaude van Itallie’s radical chic America Hurrah, during which Smith spied
MY FRIEND TOM
Williams seated nearby with a “fixed, stoned smile” on his face (108). After the show, the friends headed off for a drink, only to be interrupted in their perambulation when “the body of a man who had been hit by another man literally flew through the air and fell at our feet” (108). The ensuing brawl, Smith writes, “spoke brilliantly of the message offered by van Itallie . . . [and] all we could do then was hail a passing cab, get back to our hotel, and wonder about the world we were living in that we had seen so accurately and forcefully depicted for us that evening” (108‒9). The playwright’s stuporous expression, the absence of dialogue, the abrupt, almost cinematic hyperkinesis of the fight, and the unresolved conclusion coalesce to make the account gorgeous as well as suggestive. It is perhaps best to read My Friend Tom unencumbered by expectation. A reader content to drift through the book buoyed up by Smith’s prose and heartened by his love for his subject will benefit from many of his fugitive observations as from the somewhat fuller sections noted above. Smith’s description of Clark Mills McBurney’s eyes as “a dull gray-blue that lit up like the underside of a crashing wave” (19) vibrates with an intensity not generally found in academic books. His brief reminiscence of the St. Louis production of Candles to the Sun (1937), Williams’s first professionally staged full-length play, is particularly valuable for not having been hitherto committed to print. The recuperative and pedagogical power of age is amply on display in Smith’s recollection of the voice—with “its light and dark resonance . . . that was capable of lifting the listener into the realm of pure poetry” (60)—that Laurette Taylor brought to the role of Amanda Wingfield in the premiere of The Glass Menagerie (1945). Passages like these help attenuate the book’s shortcomings, which are in any case forgivable in a memoir that, like the better sort of Williams character, is neither jaundiced nor exploitative.
University of North Texas
Alexander Pettit
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P h i l o l o g i c a l Q u a r t e r ly | V o l u m e 9 1 | n o . 2 | S p r i n g
Volume 91 | no. 2 | Spring 2012
P h i l o l o g i c a l Q u a r t e r ly
Contents
2012
Introduction: Shakespeare for Sale.......................................... Adam G. Hooks The Market for Playbooks and the Development of the Reading Public................................................ Peter Berek Serials, Spinoffs, and Histories: Selling “Shakespeare” in Collection before the Folio.................. Tara L. Lyons Shakespeare’s Theatrical Folio............................................... Francis X. Connor The Shakespeare Apocrypha and Canonical Expansion in the Marketplace....................................................... Peter Kirwan Arms and the Book: “Workes,” “Playes,” and “Warlike Accoutrements” in William Cavendish’s The Country Captain......................................................... Vimala C. Pasupathi
ISSN 0031-7977
Playbills, Prologues, and Playbooks: Selling Shakespeare Adaptations, 1678–82.................Emma Lesley Depledge
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