CHAPTER 7

BOOK TRADE

ADAM G. H O O KS

IN 1601, Thomas Wright lamented and enumerated the ways the world led one to sin, coupling 'obscenous and naughty Bookes' with 'stageplayes, and such impure exer­cises', both of which 'corrupt extreamly all good manners'. To purchase these 'dregges of mens wits' was actually to commit an act of theft, for those who did so were 'robbing their owne soules of grace and goodnesse' (sigs. X6-X7). Three decades later, William Prynne reiterated this polemical commonplace in his infamously verbose attack on plays in performance and, notably, in print, where they became naughty books themselves. For Prynne, printed plays were 'vanities' or 'idle recreations' with no redeeming worth or value, and to sell them was thus 'fraudulent and sinfull' (1633 edn., sig. 5Z2). While Wright and Prynne roundly condemned this sinful swindling of souls, the language of commerce employed by both discloses the disquieting economic reality they were forced to confront. As Prynne vainly complained, 'Play-books' were 'now more vendible than the choycest Sermons' (sigs. *3-*3v).

The problem for Prynne was not purely, or even primarily, the popularity and profitability of printed playbooks. The dynamics of the capitalist market had radically redefined the very conditions and constituents of value by granting priority to com-

'

mercial rather than spiritual concerns. By promoting and selling these vendible vanities, the London book trade was willingly and wilfully capitalizing on the calculated exchange of spiritual health for financial wealth. A book's profit, in an ethical sense-its potential to edify and educate-was superseded and yet determined by its commercial profitability. Intrinsic worth or aesthetic merit did not essentially or primarily establish a book's quality; rather, this worth or merit depended on and was defined by its fiscal viability. To be vendible was to be valuable. Adhering to this system of value may have risked one's eternal reward, but it could ensure a rich earthly compensation in return. Wright's denunciation of these impious pamphlets attempted to rectify this imbalance, as he opposes them to the 'thousandes of spirituall Volumes', such as sermons, Bibles, and prayer books, which 'surpasse the other in number, in efficacie, in learning'. These 'spirituall Volumes' were in no danger of being outnumbered, for Prynne's contention notwithstanding, religious works were ubiquitous in the bookshops of early modern

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London. Even though there were fewer 'naughty Bookes' in print, both Wright and Prynne worried about their potentially outsized impact on a perilously corruptible reading public. Though Wright argued that the disparity in efficacy and learning between the two kinds of books prohibited any meaningful comparison, the very presence of his denunciation acknowledges the undeniable power of profane pamph­lets. The lamentably palpable appeal of these 'other' pamphlets led to an enviable notoriety, and the accusations aimed at the supposedly sinful, self-interested stationers and the eager consumers they supplied were often tinged with jealousy.

Although Wright did not name any of the 'light and wanton Poets' (sig. X6v) he deplored, his indictment would have served as an apt appraisal of the contemporary reputation of William Shakespeare, chief writer of 'stageplayes' for the Lord Chamber­lain's Men and notorious author of 'obscenous' erotic poetry. Now central to the literary canon, not to mention school curricula, at present Shakespeare's texts are viewed neither as impediments to virtue nor as idle recreations. However, this was hot the case in his own time. In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Shake­speare was variously known as a honey-tongued love poet, as the writer of several history plays that featured compelling central characters, as a decidedly downmarket purveyor of fantastical romances, and as the dramatist responsible for plays that we now know he did not even write. These multiple authorial personae, none of which correspond to the literary genius we are familiar with today, were all created and capitalized on by the book trade in the course of conducting the everyday transactions typical of its business. For stationers, Shakespeare's works were not great books; they were good business.

Shakespeare depended on the book trade in two senses. As a writer, he existed in and engaged with a fertile textual environment, and his avid reading habits and active imagination are revealed in his poems and play-scripts, which derive from yet wholly transform the source material on which they are based. As a published author, though, Shakespeare-or, more accurately, the various versions of Shakespeare-were pro­duced by commercial and textual networks that both fostered and took advantage of his success. Shakespeare was a distinctly vendible commodity, and his value-the authorial status and artistic merit ascribed to him-was inextricably tied to his com­mercial viability. His identity and reputation in the world of print were generated and inflected by the intersecting and interdependent systems of economic and aesthetic value. To think about Shakespeare and the book trade thus requires that we attend to how the stationers of early modern London employed his texts to further their own economic ends. To understand the relationship between these two corporate entities, we must focus on how the interests of the individuals and institutions of the book trade shaped Shakespeare, rather than on how Shakespeare may have used the technology of the trade to fulfil the literary ambition sometimes attributed to him. Indeed, because Shakespeare himself kept silent on the matter, we can only access whatever ambitions he may have had through the efforts of the stationers who risked their livelihood (and perhaps their spiritual well-being) by investing in the publication of his poems and plays. Shakespeare provided a steady source of income for many members of the book

128 ADAM G. HOOKS

trade, and in return they invented and reinvented his reputation as an author, inau­gurating the long and far from inevitable process that ensured his everlasting fame.

Shakespeare inhabited the world of print as immediately and enduringly as he did the theatre. There is by now a well-established body of scholarship that locates Shakespeare and his works within the collaborative conditions of the book trade, among the scribes and compositors, printers and publishers, binders and booksellers, customers and collectors who made the buying and selling of Shakespeare their business. Once marginalized as the arcane domain of editors and bibliographers, charged with the task of providing an accurate text so that critics could get on with the real intellectual work of interpreting and illuminating those texts, this brand of scholarship is now securely situated in the mainstream of early modern studies. The New Bibliography of the early twentieth century provided the foundations on which much of this work continues to rely, establishing the evidentiary bases and methodo­logical practices that institutionalized Shakespearean textual scholarship.1 However, motivated by a desire to determine the authentic text of Shakespeare's plays-the text as Shakespeare initially intended it, before his manuscript copy (which does not survive) was obscured by the necessary collaborations of the playhouse and the printing house-the New Bibliographers also instituted a number of misleading yet persistent critical narratives. Even as they focused their attention on the material practices of the book trade, their efforts were aimed at and altered by a valorization of Shakespeare as a single authorial agent. In the late twentieth century, work loosely characterized under the rubric of the New Textualism greatly expanded our knowledge of the ways in which Shakespeare's plays were collaboratively produced, in the process overturning many of the pre-existing narratives of textual scholarship.2 Early contribu­tions to this research focused on the variant versions of some of Shakespeare's plays, which were explained through the idea of authorial revision, thereby allowing us access to the plays as performed and adapted, perhaps by Shakespeare himself. 3 The focus on Shakespeare largely upheld the New Bibliography's model of single authorship, though, in contrast to other work that decentred the author, focusing instead on the ways Shakespearean authorship and authority were constructed-that is, on how

'

Shakespeare became 'Shakespeare' -and the concomitant elevation of the ephemeral

1 The New Bibliographers included W.W. Greg, A.W. Pollard, J. D. Wilson, and R. B. McKerrow, among others. On the history and influence of the New Bibliography, see Paul Werstine, 'Narratives about Printed Shakespeare Texts: "Foul Papers" and "Bad Quartos"', Shakespeare Quarterly 4u (1990), 65-86, and Laurie Maguire Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The 'Bad' Quartos and Their Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

2 Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass ('The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text', Shakespeare Quarterly 44.3 (1993), 255-83) coined the term. The New Textualism was indebted to post-structuralist theoretical movements within early modern studies, particularly New Historicism, and to the sociology of texts within bibliography, identified with the work of D. F. McKenzie and Jerome J. McGann. The various strands of the history of the book, or print culture studies, associated with Roger Chartier, Robert Darn ton, and Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, mark the point of origin or inspiration for much of this work.

3 This work led to the inclusion of two texts of King Lear in The Oxford Shakespeare; see Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

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genre of drama to a fittingly literary status-that is, how the plays were transformed in the transition from stage to page.4

Recent work has continued to revise and refine what has become the new orthodoxy by investigating the various practices of textual production and reception, exploring and exploiting the critical and interpretive potential of focusing not on authors but rather on other agents such as readers or publishers. 5 This important research has begun to change the way we classify, and thus interpret, literary texts, and in considering Shakespeare's plays as books, it has been most productive in adjusting how we think about printed drama in particular. Critical work remains to be done on the relationship between drama's appearance in print and its perceived literary status, since the category of the literary was much less defined, and much more complicated, in the early modem period than many scholars have assumed. Print did not immediately or inevitably confer upon drama the high literary status it has since achieved. Rather, printed drama emerged as a category unto itself-distinct from other poetic genres, and distinctively profitable.

This is not to say that Shakespeare himself has entirely disappeared from early modern textual studies-far from it. Another strand of scholarship has reclaimed Shakespeare as a deliberately active participant in the processes that have been sepa­rated from him.6 Accompanied by a revitalization of attribution studies (the attempt to determine exactly which parts of collaborative plays were written by Shakespeare) as well as a renewed interest in Shakespearean biography,

· this strand reincorporates

Shakespeare into the narrative of the New Bibliography, and seems particularly indebt­ed to post-Romantic notions of authorship. Although attending to both the poems and the plays, this recent work still isolates the poems as the product of a wholly autono­mous artist, whose authority can then be transferred to the plays, which are in this view similarly characterized as autonomous literary creations. The recent attention to Shakespeare's career as a poet, and his poetic oeuvre, has certainly been welcome, since Shakespeare was known throughout his lifetime (and beyond) as a poet, with a distinct style and a beloved brand. However, his roles as a poet and as a playwright were

4 David Scott Kastan rebranded this kind of scholarship the 'New Boredom', as a way of foregrounding the detailed historical particularity of this work (Shakespeare After Theory [New York: Routledge, 1999], 18). Representative studies include Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Douglas Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

5 For an overview of recent developments, see Marta Straznicky (ed.), The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006); see also Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Tiffany Stern, Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page (New York: Routledge, 2004); Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Sonia Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

6 The most significant recent studies are Lukas Erne Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and idem, Shakespeare's Literary Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

130 ADAM G. HOOKS

not determined by Shakespeare alone. He was not a solitary literary genius producing, propagating, and authorizing both poems and plays. Rather, in print, both the poems and the plays-and Shakespeare's career as a poet and a playwright-were produced collaboratively by the agents working in, and the economic conditions of, the early modern book trade.

SWEET SHAKESPEARE

The poem that earned Shakespeare the title of a poet (and a 'light and wanton' one at that) was his debut in print, Venus and Adonis, a narrative poem that expands on an episode from Ovid's Metamorphoses. When it initially appeared in 1593, it was an immediate success, and its impact on Shakespeare's reputation simply cannot be overstated. Venus and Adonis was by far the most popular (and profitable) of Shake­speare's works: no fewer than ten editions were published during his lifetime, with a further six extant editions through the seventeenth century, in total almost twice the number of his most successful play.7 Shakespeare was recognized first and foremost as a poet-a distinctly Ovidian poet primarily associated with the scandalous subjects of Venus and Adonis. Ven us' erotic blazon of herself-suggestively urging Adonis to 'Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry, I Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie'-was perhaps the most oft-cited, and certainly the most infamous, passage from Shakespeare in the early modern period.8 The fashionable, delectable poem made Shakespeare's fame, and it remained the quintessential Shakespearean work for years to come.

Venus and Adonis has also retained a special place in critical accounts of Shakespeare's career and development as a writer. Imitating and amplifying its Ovidian model, the poem directly demonstrates the formative poetic and thematic influence Ovid exerted over Shakespeare from the very beginning of his professional life. The Ovidian motto on, the title-page of Venus and Adonis-the only such motto ever to appear on any of Shakespeare's printed works-seems to confirm this artistic affinity: 'Vilia miretur vulgus: mihi Jlavus Apollo I Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua'. Taken from the first book of the Amores, the motto is usually glossed with Christopher Marlowe's translation of the lines: 'Let base-conceited wits, admire vilde things I Fair Phoebus lead me to the Muses' springs'. The Castalian fountain was sacred to the Muses and to the god of poetry, Apollo ('Fair Phoebus'), and so the motto boldly proclaims Ovid as a source both of inspiration and of poetic ambition. How it may have been construed by contemporaries is another matter, though. The motto and the elegy it was taken from were well-known statements of poetic power, and it circulated widely, including

7 Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). s Sasha Roberts, Reading Shakespeare's Poems in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2003), 85.

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as the preface to an anthology of classical texts known to every boy who had attended grammar school. The association with Ovid could have deleterious effects, too. Ovid was a culturally contested figure whose love poetry, in particular, evoked the same moral consternation directed at wanton pamphlets like Venus and Adonis itself, and attempts were made at prohibiting, or at least mitigating, Ovid's lascivious provoca­tions, either by banning the publication of the love poetry, or more commonly, by attaching moralizing glosses to English translations. (It was not by chance that the volume in which Marlowe's rendition of the Amores was first published, c.1599, was censored.) These attempts were unsurprisingly unsuccessful, as the popularity of Venus and Adonis, and the plethora of other Ovidian poems that appeared in the 1590s, so clearly attests.

That Venus and Adonis appeared during an outbreak of plague, when the London theatres were closed, has led many to interpret the 'vulgus' mentioned in the motto as a reference to the vulgar business of the commercial theatre in which Shakespeare was 'quickly advancing, and from which, according to this version of events, he was attempting to distance himself. There is little reason to think so, however, since the vocations of poet and playwright were not mutually exclusive. The title-page motto was indeed accompanied by a dedication to the Earl of Southampton, signed by Shakespeare, bolstering the idea that the poem was planned as a dignified bid for aristocratic patronage, thereby gaining (or at least claiming) a greater degree of authorial status than was available to a workaday dramatist. This is surely the most plausible explanation, but the poet's attempt to secure a patron did not require a rejection of his professional obligations in the theatre, for which, after all, he had just written the equally Ovidian Titus Andronicus. Furthermore, the attempt did not lead straightforwardly to the achievement of either increased status or a steady income from a patron. Although Southampton was becoming known as a sympathetic supporter of prospective proteges, very little had previously been dedicated to him, at least in part because the young earl was in dire financial straits. Shakespeare continued a public affiliation with the earl the next year, in 1594, dedicating to him The Rape of Lucrece, his second published poem and presumably the 'graver labour' he had promised in the epistle to Venus and Adonis. That he did so may indicate that Shakespeare had received something from Southampton in return, but even so, there is no further record of transactions between the two after the initial dedication of Lucrece. If a desire for patronage and prestige did motivate Shakespeare's dedications, it was a desire he seems to have abandoned relatively quickly. He soon shifted his attention to his professional role in the theatre, leaving the business of propagating his fame as a poet to the stationers who continued to publish and profit from the two poems. The conventional critical narrative that locates in the poetry a Shakespeare in complete artistic control of his creations, desiring and designing a career as a published author, neglects the fact that the book trade was just as collaborative an environment as the theatre, even if those collaborations took different forms. The reception of his poems and the inter­pretation and construction of his status depended on much more than an implied interpersonal interaction between poet and patron.

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There is one further biographical coincidence that has inhibited a full recognition of the commercial context that produced Shakespeare's poetry, partially obscuring how Shakespeare the poet was made. The printer of both Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, the successful and well-connected Richard Field, happened to hail from Stratford-upon­Avon, Shakespeare's hometown. Since Field was not otherwise an obvious choice-he was not often involved with this kind of vernacular poetry-the most likely scenario is that Shakespeare did indeed bring his debut poem to Field. But Field was not simply a convenient conduit through which Shakespeare made it into print; once Field entered Venus and Adonis in the Stationers' Register, it became his property, subject to his own interests and concerns. Field was not simply the printer-the stationer who actually produced the physical artiefact-but also the publisher, responsible for laying out the initial capital, hiring a printer (in this case himself ), and securing a bookseller to serve as the wholesaler.9 In this respect, Field's importance extends beyond his Stratford origins to include his partnership with John Harrison, the bookseller of Venus and Adonis. It was Harrison who entered Lucrece in the Stationers' Register in 1594, and who soon after acquired Venus and Adonis from Field. Harrison hence became the publisher of Shakespeare's poems, while continuing to hire Field as the printer. It was also for Harrison that Field printed a three-volume set of Ovid's complete works, in Latin. In Harrison's bookshop, Shakespeare's two poems stood side by side with their classical models, thereby providing a strikingly material manifestation of the Ovidian milieu in which Shakespeare's poems circulated-a milieu that becomes not only more visible but also tangible by looking beyond any personal relationship that may have existed between Shakespeare and Field.

Shakespeare's printer and publisher also shaped the two poems in another signifi­cantly material way, designing nearly identical title-pages that made them a conspicu­ously matched set. Lucrece was never as popular as its more renowned precursor, although the nine editions that appeared through the seventeenth century do equal the most popular of Shakespeare's plays. While the myth of Lucretia could be found in a number of sources, including Ovid, the more ponderous and political Lucrece was prefaced by a prose argument, derived from Livy, which outlined the narrative's potentially republican implications. Nevertheless, it was visibly presented and often perceived as a companion piece to Venus and Adonis, as another characteristically Shakespearean work. By the end of the decade, Shakespeare was thoroughly identified as an Ovidian poet, to the extent that Francis Meres could remark that the 'sweet wittie soule of Ouid liues in mellifluous & hony-tongued Shakespeare,' mentioning both Venus and Adonis and Lucrece by name.10 Shakespeare's identification with Ovid had thus become both material and metaphysical.

9 On the distinctions among these three roles, see Peter W. M. Blayney 'The Publication of Playbooks', in A New History of Early English Drama, John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan, (eds.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 383-422. On the importance of publishers, see Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

10 Meres, Palladis Tamia (London, 1598), sig. 001v.

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Just as important as the invocation of Ovid was the term 'sweet'. The customary adjective used to describe a certain pleasing smoothness of poetic style, 'sweet' was the term most commonly applied to Shakespeare in his time, usually in conjunction with his poetry. The desirable quality of sweetness was by no means limited to Shake­speare-it was often ascribed to a range of other popular and stylistically sophisticated writers, from poets to preachers-but it did denote the particular appeal of his verse. When printed commonplace books began using the published work of contemporary vernacular writers at the turn of the century, they overwhelmingly relied on those who had already been branded 'sweet'. The verse produced by 'hony-tongued' poets was distinctly quotable, and could thus be repurposed and repackaged to serve a variety of uses. Shakespeare's two poems proved to be attractive sources, and extracts from them far outnumber those taken from the few plays that had reached print by this time.11 By using the work of Shakespeare, these printed books further contributed to his burgeon­ing authorial reputation. ' The lack of control over his own reputation, and the comparative power of the book trade, is demonstrated by the ensuing success of Shakespeare's sought-after brand, which was soon extended by other stationers. In addition to identifying Shakespeare with Ovid, Francis Meres offered a tantalizing glimpse at Shakespeare's hitherto unpublished work, mentioning 'his sugred Sonnets among his priuate friends' along­side the two celebrated best-sellers (sig. 201v). Customers unable to get their hands on one of the copies circulating in manuscript did not have to wait long, though. In 1599, The Passionate Pi/grime appeared in print, a collection of poems that included two of these 'sugred Sonnets', variant versions of what we now know as Sonnets 138 and 144, along with three sonnets from the recently published play Love's Labour's Lost (1598). While attributed to Shakespeare on the title-page, most of the volume consists of non­Shakespearean poems, notably several pastiches on the theme of Venus and Adonis. Published by William Jaggard, a stationer who would remain in the Shakespeare business for over two decades, The Passionate Pi/grime was undoubtedly an attempt to capitalize on Shakespeare's established fame as a poet. The volume was sold, by no coincidence, at the shop of William Leake, who had by that time acquired the publishing rights to Venus and Adonis. Jaggard smartly started the volume by grouping together most of the actual Shakespearean compositions, with the two unpublished sonnets given pride of place. Jaggard has been maligned for this seeming act of deception, profiting from Shakespeare while diluting the quality of his poetry by mixing it with the work of poets who have failed to achieve an eminence similar to Shakespeare's. This early embarrassment has often been explained away, in order to preserve Jaggard's later, more laudable involvement with Shakespeare, which will be addressed below. But Jaggard was simply engaging in normal business practices, producing the kind of collection that was popular in the 1590s. Indeed, Jaggard should

11 Roger Chartier and Peter Stallybrass, 'Reading and Authorship: The Circulation of Shakespeare 1590-1619', in A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text, Andrew Murphy, (ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 35-56.

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be vindicated, since The Passionate Pilgrime was a key constituent of Shakespeare's poetic identity at the turn of the century. And it would continue to be so: Jaggard republished the volume in 1612, sweetening the deal by explicitly advertising 'Certaine Amorous Sonnets, I betweene Ven us and Adonis, I newly corrected and aug- I mented. I By W. Shakespere.' Shakespeare of course had nothing to do with either correcting or augmenting the volume; Jaggard here used the most common, if misleading, of marketing tactics. But not everyone was pleased by this tactic, and Jaggard seems to have taken Shakespeare's name off the title-page after objections were raised by Thomas Heywood, whose poetry had been appended to the augmented edition. Hey­wood refused to be annexed to, or usurped by, Shakespeare's authorial prominence, but he also reported Shakespeare's own displeasure with Jaggard's little volume. Despite­or indeed because of-Shakespeare's apparent objection, The Passionate Pilgrime shows the agency, the importance, and the success of stationers in fashioning Shake­speare's authorial identity.

The extent to which the 'sweet' Shakespearean persona shaped this identity is shown by the reception of his plays, particularly those with thematic, stylistic, or formal connections to the poetry, like Romeo and Juliet and Love's Labour's Lost. The first extant edition of the latter, published in 1598, was the first printed play to bear Shakespeare's name on the title-page (once again, as the corrector and augmenter, leading scholars to believe that a previously published edition of the play has been lost, along with the labours of love) . A year later, three of the sonnets interspersed in the play reappeared in The Passionate Pilgrime. In context, the extracted sonnets-com­posed by Berowne, Longaville, and Dumaine-simultaneously mock and exemplify the conventions of the love sonnet. After hearing Berowne' s sonnet, for example, the pedant Holofernes judges that it lacks 'elegancie, facilitie, and golden cadence of poesie', proclaiming instead that 'Oviddius Naso was the man' (sigs. Elv-far) . On stage, the episode is a pointedly ironic appraisal of Shakespeare's own 'poesie' as well as his poetic model. In print, though, the sonnet became an accepted part of Shakespeare's poetic work, furthering Shakespeare's identification with this particular form.

Although the complete collection of what we now know as Shakespeare's 154 sonnets did not reach print for another decade, in 1609, even the earlier scattered sonnets helped to constitute his renown, and his value as a commodity in the book trade. Once again, as with the earlier narrative poems, critical attention has been focused on whether or not Shakespeare authorized the publication of the sonnets, and what this might tell us about the sonnets themselves, and about his ambition as a poet. The desire to find Shakespeare within the sonnets derives from the post-Romantic tradition of reading the sonnet as a more personally revealing form than the playscript, which requires the writer to produce a number of different characters. However, even if Shakespeare personally assembled and authorized the collected sonnets, the printed collection was still shaped by the conventions of the sonnet sequences of the period­and the investment of a stationer. Whatever Shakespeare's role in their publication may have been (and there is no definitive evidence that he was involved in any way), his collection of sonnets was an important, and long-awaited, part of his reputation in

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print. The title-page prominently presents the volume as Shake-speares Sonnets, the name here as much a marker of authorial possession as a shrewd marketing device intended to whet the appetite of customers for what they could finally find inside: as the title-page further promises, these sonnets were 'Neuer before imprinted.'

The publisher of the Sonnets, Thomas Thorpe, took the liberty of attaching a dedica­tion that over the years has garnered as much attention and speculation as the poems that follow it. The epistle, taking the form of an inscription, is infamously addressed to 'THE. ONLIE.BEGETTER.OF. I THESE.INSVING.SONNETS', cryptically referred to only as 'MR W.H.' The owner of these initials is unknown; it could be a patron, whom the 'EVER.LIVING.POET' apparently promised 'ALL.HAPPINESSE' and even 'ETERNI­TIE' itself. However, it is not Shakespeare who does the promising in this preface; rather, it is Thorpe, who signs off as 'THE.WELL.WISHING I ADVENTVRER.IN. ! SETTING. ! FORTH. I T.T.' 'Setting forth' was a standard phrase for the process of printing a text, and so Thorpe here claims responsibility for making the Sonnets public. By calling himself an 'adventurer', Thorpe also draws attention to the commercial enterprise of publication-of the risk and potential reward of selling Shakespeare's sonnets (OED, 'adventurer,' 4). The transactions are Thorpe's, rather than Shakespeare's; economic and material, rather than personal and authorial. Despite the critical effort expended to locate Shakespeare behind this epistle-an effort that exposes our desire for a Shakespeare who fully determined the conditions of authorship and all that entails-we should not overlook the role of Thorpe and his fellow 'adventurers', who actually ensured that the ever living poet would indeed continue to live in print.

Sw AGGERING SHAKESPEARE

Meres may have begun his praise of Shakespeare by admiring his 'sweet' Ovidian poetry, but he quickly followed by naming Shakespeare the 'most excellent' for both comedy and tragedy on stage, citing the models of Plautus and Seneca, along with a substantial list of examples from the promising playwright's repertoire. Shakespeare first appeared in print as a poet, but this identity existed alongside his growing renown as a working-and as a published-dramatist. In print, plays like Love's Labour's Lost and Romeo and Juliet supplied readers with another source of Shakespearean sweet­ness. Others, however, promoted a somewhat different version of Shakespeare, one increasingly known for plays based on the chronicles of English history, and featuring compelling, captivating central characters.

Shakespeare's career as a playwright in print began almost simultaneously, if less conspicuously, with his career as a published poet. In 1594, the year Lucrece appeared, two Shakespeare plays reached the London bookstalls, albeit with no visible link to the dramatist. The title-page of 'THE I MOST LA-! mentable Romaine I Tragedie of Titus Andronicus' advertised the play's extensive theatrical history, naming three different acting companies-but no playwright. That same year, Thomas Millington, one of the

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stationers selling Titus, published 'THE I First part of the Con- I tention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke I and Lancaster' (what we now call 2 Henry VI), providing a thorough plot summary on the title-page, but again with no mention of a dramatist. The next year Millington published the continuation, 'The true Tragedie of Richard I Duke of Yorke' (3 Henry VI), explicitly linking the play to its precursor by referring to 'the whole contention' between the houses of Lancaster and York. Although Millington was an early investor in the Shakespeare business, he seems to have been either unaware of, or uninterested in, the possibility of promoting Shakespeare himself. Indeed, while Millington's investment helped reveal the appeal of a published Shake­speare play, his greater contribution was to help establish the viability of printed plays as a category of books. When Millington began selling plays in 1594, he was taking a risk on an uncertain commodity. He could not have known that 1594 would in fact be a watershed year for printed playbooks, witnessing an unprecedented surge in publica­tion that suddenly and strikingly demonstrated their commercial potential.12 The potential prominence of Shakespeare, or for that matter of any writer, as a published playwright depended on the established profitability of printed plays themselves. Once again, in the book trade, viability equals vendibility.

Millington first brought Shakespeare's plays to the bookshops, but the most sus­tained, significant, and successful investment in Shakespeare's plays was made by the bookseller and sometime publisher Andrew Wise. In 1597 Wise published 'THE I Tragedie of King Ri- I chard the se- I cond' (Richard II), and 'THE TRAGEDY OF I King Richard the third' (Richard III), and added 'THE I HISTORY OF I HENRIE THE I FOURTH' (1 Henry IV) the next year. These three titles would prove to be the three most popular of Shakespeare's plays in print, and indeed they were among the most popular of all printed playbooks in the period.13 How Wise came to acquire these plays is uncertain, but he certainly knew how to make the most out of these properties once they came into his possession. Like Millington, Wise first published his three plays without attributing them to Shakespeare. When his initial stock quickly sold out, Wise reissued the plays almost immediately, with one noteworthy alteration: he added Shakespeare's name to the title-pages, indicating that he, and more importantly that

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his customers, recognized an emerging brand. Once Shakespeare's plays had been shown to be profitable, his name could be recognized and exploited as a marketing tactic. Indeed, Wise found Shakespeare's plays to be such reliable and attractive commodities that he added to his stock in 1600, publishing 'THE I Second part of Henrie I the fourth', and 'Much adoe about I Nothing', both of which he connected to his three best-sellers by including the playwright's name. These two plays were not as popular as their predecessors, but Wise continued to maximize his investment in

12 Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, 'The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited', Shakespeare Quarterly 56.1 (2005), 1-32.

13 Richard II would be published a total of six times through the seventeenth century; Richard III eight times; and 1 Henry IV nine times. According to Farmer and Lesser, only 7.2 per cent of playbooks reached a sixth edition; 3-4 per cent reached an eighth edition; and only 1.9 per cent a ninth edition. (Farmer and Lesser, 'The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited').

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Shakespeare by making minor corrections in the reprinted editions, even advertising them with the inflated claim that they had been 'Newly corrected' by Shakespeare.14

Wise's wildly successful series of Shakespeare plays augmented his reputation in print. No longer simply sweet, Shakespeare was now associated with a succession of sensational characters. Shakespeare's plays participated in the 1590s vogue for stories about the reigns of English monarchs from the recent past, in the process helping to consolidate that popular genre. They proved most memorable, however, for the exploits of distinctive characters such as the eponymous villain of Richard III and the roguish thieves who stole the Henry IV plays, Falstaff and Pistol. Wise cannily capitalized on such star turns by describing their onstage exploits on the title-pages of his editions, displaying their names more prominently than that of their creator, and Shakespeare's success in print was closely tied to their notoriety. The profitable profligacy of Falstaff became something of a franchise: 1 Henry IV advertises the 'humorous conceits of Sir Iohn Falstaffe', and on the title-page of 2 Henry IV he is joined by his tavern companion, 'Swaggering Pistoll'. 'Falstaff was subsequently given top billing in his very own play, which we know now as the Merry Wives of Windsor, but which was published in 1602 as 'A I Most pleasaunt and I excellent conceited Co- I medie, of Syr John Falstaffe', where he is once again joined by the 'swaggering vaine of Auncient I Pistoll '. The marketing strategies used to promote the printed editions of these plays reveal a Shakespeare identified not with the qualities of his honeyed verse, but rather with the identifiable traits of his idiosyncratic characters.

Proclaiming Shakespeare's authorship of his plays seems an obvious tactic to us, but dramatic authorship was at the time a promising, though unproven, venture. The sudden surge in Shakespeare's visibility as a published playwright has typically been taken as the mark of his rising stature as an author, and even as a rise in status of the concept of dramatic authorship itself.15 This attractive narrative, whereby Shakespeare single­handedly converts drama into a literary genre, conflates the canonical value drama has subsequently achieved with the more immediate marketing tactics used by stationers to sell a newly viable class of printed playbooks. For Andrew Wise, Shakespeare's name may have had as much to do with capitalizing on his concurrent fame as a poet, as with distinguishing and promoting Shakespeare as a playwright. Printed playbooks, and the playwrights they named, were emerging as a distinct category of books, however. As has been demonstrated, William Prynne was right, correctly detecting that playbooks were indeed more vendible than sermons.16 While sermons still came out ahead in the sheer number of first editions, playbooks were actually more popular, since they were rep­rinted at a much higher rate. Reprint editions were more profitable than the first edition, since stationers did not have to worry about one-time expenses such as acquiring manuscript copy or entering the title with the Stationers' Company.17 Reprint editions

14 Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 15 Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 16 Farmer and Lesser, 'The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited'. 17 Peter W. M. Blayney, 'The Publication of Playbooks', in A New History of Early English Drama,

John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan, (eds.) (New York: Columbia University Press, i997), 383-422.

....

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were also easier to produce, since compositors could use copy that was already printed. And, of course, the very presence of a reprint edition indicates not only that the print run of the first edition had sold well, but that the publisher deemed it profitable to produce a new edition, thereby supplying the continuing demand for the title. While the outlook of any single playbook was uncertain, on the whole, playbooks outperformed the market average, and thus came to be considered a sound investment, particularly when a stationer could rely on the renown of an established writer. Shakespeare's plays were among the most popular, helping to reinforce the profitability of the commercial category of playbooks, as well as his own authorial brand-a brand desirable enough that it expanded beyond the bounds of what Shakespeare actually wrote.

BAD SHAKESPEARE

The book trade may have established the commercial, and hence the conceptual, viability of plays in print, but the way this was accomplished has often earned stationers the reproach of modern scholars for mangling and mishandling Shakespeare's master­pieces. Editors in particular have berated the printers of the early quartos, assailing their moral culpability for violating Shakespeare's textual corpus in language not unlike that used by Prynne and his fellow polemicists. At times, critics have equated the authenticity of Shakespearean texts with undisputed, and hence uncontaminated, Shakespearean authorship. The New Bibliographers created the category of so-called 'bad' quartos, abridged editions of plays such as Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet with jumbled syntax or garbled diction. These 'bad' quartos were usually attributed to greedy minor actors, who were accused of poorly recreating a playscript from memory-a process known as 'memorial reconstruction' -and selling it to a similarly suspect stationer for a quick profit. The irregularities of these texts were deemed inadequate and inferior to the 'good' versions found in later quartos or in the First Folio. The compilers of the Folio--the landmark collection of Shakespeare's plays published in 1623-denigrated some of the earlier quartos as 'stolne, and surreptitious copies,' conveniently offering instead the 'True Originall Copies' of the plays as Shakespeare had first written them, a distinction that the New Bibliographers were all too eager to affirm.18 The moralistic terminology surrounding these supposedly corrupt texts and the equally corrupt agents blamed for their creation largely governed the critical and editorial discourse until recently. Scholars have now realized that these 'bad' quartos cannot be discounted, since they may

18 The New Bibliographers created yet another category, authorial 'foul papers', to describe Shakespeare's own working drafts, prizing these manuscripts (which were necessarily imaginary, since manuscripts in Shakespeare's hand do not survive except for a few lines of Sir Thomas More) above scribal 'fair copies', playhouse 'promptbooks', and of course the 'memorial reconstructions' of actors. For an analysis of the evidence-or lack thereof-to support these categories, see Werstine, "'Foul Papers'", and Laurie Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The 'Bad' Quartos and Their Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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represent texts closer to what was actually performed in the theatre, while in print they constituted a tangible part of Shakespeare's authorial reputation. 'Bad' Shakespeare was still Shakespeare, and an accurate account of his work demands attention to the currency of these quartos in his time.

The worst of the 'bad' quartos is Pericles, a play that was excluded from the First Folio altogether, and the only 'bad' Shakespearean text that never appeared in a longer, 'good' version. First published in 1609 as 'THE LATE, I And much admired Play, I Called I Pericles, Prince I of Tyre', it has long been anything but 'admired', suffering more critical derision than any other Shakespeare play, and occupying a particularly precarious position in the canon. The text of Pericles is admittedly confusing and often impenetrable, vexing the efforts of editors and inhibiting a close, or even adequate, consideration of the play. The genre of the play has also caused consternation. An especially scattered example of the geographically and chronologically far-flung stage romance-not usually considered a typical Shakespearean genre-Pericles sits a bit uneasily alongside other, more beloved late plays like The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. The most significant problem Pericles presents, though, is that Shakespeare wrote only a little more than half of the play, working with a collaborator whose reputation is unsavoury, to say the least. Shakespeare's partner in composing Pericles was George Wilkins, a minor writer better known for owning a brothel. Wilkins also attempted to cash in on his dramatic collaboration with Shakespeare by producing a prose pamphlet version of the play, The Painfull Aduentures of Pericles Prince of Tyre, published a year before the play in 1608. The alleged immorality of Wilkins has tainted not only Pericles, but the very idea of Shakespearean collaboration. Indeed, critics have often suggested that the play was excluded from the Folio because it was a collaborative work, or more precisely, because it was a more collaborative work than other plays. Far from being an anomalous and nearly non-Shakespearean product, however, Pericles was entirely consistent with-even characteristic of-the conditions and practices of both the theatre and the book trade. Shakespeare often collaborated with other dramatists, and we know that he knew Wilkins personally. Further, while it was not very common for a play to be adapted into a prose pamphlet, other kinds of stories or events frequently appeared in multiple print genres. If there is a problem with Pericles, it should not be blamed on Wilkins.

Pericles may now be classified as bad on nearly every level-a corrupt, collaborative, and uncharacteristic play-but it was undeniably popular in Shakespeare's time. In fact Pericles was one of the most identifiably Shakespearean works; it may show us an unfamiliar Shakespeare, but one nevertheless rooted in the customary conditions of textual production, particularly within the early modern book trade. It was published a total of six times in the seventeenth century, including twice in its first year-a feat matched only by Richard II and 1 Henry IV. Despite the fact that Shakespeare wrote only part of Pericles, in print it belonged solely to him: the title-page advertises the play as 'By William Shakespeare'. The publisher of Pericles, Henry Gosson, specialized in timely, ephemeral pamphlets that capitalized on popular or notorious events, and the immediate notoriety of Pericles certainly fit his business model. Gosson had previously

140 ADAM G. HOOKS

published a play written by Wilkins alone, which may explain how he acquired the copy. His decision to advertise Pericles as a Shakespeare play may have been based on his recognition-and acquisition-of Shakespeare's more established brand.

The subsequent history of Pericles in print is also notable, as the play participated in further incarnations of 'bad' Shakespeare. In 1619, William Jaggard, publisher of The Passionate Pilgrime, printed a series of ten previously published plays for Thomas Pavier. The series, now known as the Pavier Quartos, was intended to be a small Shakespearean collection, starting with a combined text of 2 and 3 Henry VI, retitled 'The I Whole Contention I betweene the two Famous I Houses, LANCASTER and I YORKE', with continuous signatures.19 The third play was Pericles, published separately, but designed to be sold either by itself, or bound together with The Whole Contention. Thereafter, though, the remaining seven plays were published independently, several with misleading imprints, a seeming act of deception that has cast a shadow of corruption over the entire enterprise. A number of the Pavier Quartos are 'bad' texts, later superseded by other versions. Even worse, two of the ten plays were not written by Shakespeare at all: 'A I YORKSHIRE I TRAGEDIE' and 'The first part I Of the true & hono- I rable history, of the Life of I Sir John Old-castle', an alternative version of the life of the historical figure who had inspired the creation of Falstaff. However, when A Yorkshire Tragedy was first published in 1608, it was advertised as 'Written by VV. Shakspeare', and while Old-castle had appeared anonymously, the attribution to Shakespeare shows how thoroughly the character of Falstaff had become identified with the playwright.

Now the attribution of spurious plays to Shakespeare looks devious, but at the time the texts were accepted as his, and they comprised a part of Shakespeare's reputation in print. The attributions look 'bad' when judged by modern principles of textual authen­ticity, but not when assessed by early modern standards. Writers did not own their texts; stationers did, and they could market their properties however they pleased. Pericles may have been excluded from the First Folio, but it was eventually included in the second issue of the Third Folio (1664) along with six other plays previously attributed to Shakespeare. In the world of print, all of these contributed to the Shakespearean personae. Pericles is the only one of these plays now accepted as part of the canon; the other plays of the so-called 'apocrypha' have more or less fallen from view, although the Shakespearean canon, and thus our idea of the Shakespearean, continues to be negotiated to this day.

BIG SHAKESPEARE

The criticism aimed at Pavier's scheme to produce a Shakespearean collection has as much to do with their size-quarto rather than folio-as with the false dates in their

19 Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); John Jowett, Shakespeare and Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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imprints. But in 1619 Pavier could not have known that only four years later his partner Jaggard would be involved in producing the First Folio, and he certainly could not have known that the Folio would eventually become the most fetishized book in literary history. The Folio was compiled by fellows from Shakespeare's theatre company, and produced by a syndicate of stationers including William Jaggard and his son Isaac, and Edward Blount, one of the leading literary publishers of the time. Whereas Shakespeare's plays had previously been published in the smaller, more ephemeral quarto format, they were now published in a format usually reserved for larger, more serious works. Critics have long considered the monumental and consciously com­memorative Folio as the epitome and the embodiment of the literary status of Shake­speare and of early modern drama. The book's publication has been seen as marking the moment of Shakespeare's elevation as a literary author, and the concomitant conversion of plays into a respectable literary genre. The Folio has been meticulously and repeatedly examined, and the story of its production and its cultural afterlife has

' been well chronicled. 20 The Folio's ultimate triumph, however, has obscured the fact that its success-both

commercial and conceptual-was neither assured nor immediate. The compilers' pref­atory epistle testifies to their anxiety, pleading with potential customers, 'whatever you do, Buy'. Their plea underlines the risky nature of their venture in publishing the first collection consisting only and entirely of printed plays from the professional theatre. The volume's contents were dictated as much by commercial as commemorative considerations: the syndicate scrambled to secure the rights to plays they did not own, and the exclusion of the poems may in part be explained by their ongoing profitability in their own right. In some ways, the First Folio was actually a failure. It seems not to have been an unqualified success in the bookstalls; the estimated print run of about 750 copies sold out and warranted a second edition nine years later, a span of time that has been variously characterized by critics as indicating both quick and sluggish sales. Neither did it definitively determine Shakespeare's oeuvre-either the works attributed to him, or the generic designations of those works. The book was aimed at an upscale market, but the more affordable individual copies of a handful of plays continued to circulate, along with his poetry. Even John Smethwick, a member of the Folio syndicate, thought it worth his while to mitigate his financial risk in the volume by reprinting quarto editions of his two proven Shakespearean properties, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. It was this trade in single, more widely accessible playbooks that would ultimately consolidate a distinct category of printed drama, laying the groundwork for a rudimentary form of specifically dramatic criticism, which defined Shakespeare's primary authorial identity as that of a playwright, rather than as a poet.21 The trade in single playbooks flourished throughout the seventeenth century, alongside but separate from the succession of Folios that has

20 For an overview, see Blayney, 'The Publication of Playbooks', and Anthony James West, The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001-3).

21 Adam G. Hooks, 'Booksellers' Catalogues and the Classification of Printed Drama in Seventeenth­Century England', Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 102-4 (2008), 445-64.

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dominated critical narratives. The publishers and booksellers who continued to invest in these single editions fostered the first critical attempts at enumerating and classifying the entire body of English printed drama in the late seventeenth century, attempts that perforce relied on the profusion of quarto playbooks rather than the few single-author folio collections. The Shakespeare Folio did not single-handedly raise the literary status of drama; rather, Shakespeare's status as a playwright depended upon the emergence of a coherent and distinctive category of printed drama, and the nascent criticism focused on that category. The Folio only gained the critical and cultural esteem it now holds once Shakespeare's place as the pre-eminent English author was firmly established later in the eighteenth century, when by no coincidence, the volume's monetary value among collectors began to increase exponentially.

William Prynne completed his polemic just a year after the appearance of the Second Folio (1632), and he was keenly aware, and considerably anxious about, the differences between the big Shakespeare book and the abundance of little playbooks. Prynne observed with alarm that 'Some Play-books' had 'growne from Quarto into Folio', noting with a perceptive eye that 'Shackspeers Plaies are printed in the best Crowne paper, far better than most Bibles', an accurate bibliographical description of the Second Folio (1633: sig. 2*6v). Prynne here identified what the folios are usually thought to have accomplished: that the transition from stage to page quite literally transformed and elevated Shakespeare's plays, above even the Bible-fitting for what has become a secular scripture. However, Prynne was concerned not with literary status but with ethical and spiritual worth, and the stationers of London had once again subverted his system of value with the very materials of their trade. Worse yet, these big books 'beare so good a price and sale' that even smaller bibles 'hardly finde such vent as they'. The tactile quality and commercial viability of the Second Folio disturbed Prynne, although considering its limited print run, this disturbance was perhaps more in principle, the very existence of the Folio outweighing its potential to inflict harm on its buyers. More pressing for Prynne was the prevalence of 'Quarto-Play-bookes', which 'have come forth in such abundance, and found so many customers, that they almost exceede all number'. Prynne nevertheless cited a number, claiming that 'Above forty thousand Play-bookes have beene printed and vented within these two years', a remarkably accurate figure in what was the most active period of playbook publication the market had yet seen. 22

What Prynne found to threaten the greater good of readers is exactly what those readers found appealing-and what the book trade found to be profitable. Prynne would be horrified, but the book trade's investment in Shakespeare's plays, and the profit they gained in return, made possible the profit we now derive from Shakespeare, in every sense of the word.

22 Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England, 76-7; Farmer and Lesser, 'The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited'.

T H E O X F O R D H A N D B O O K O F

S H A K E S P E A R E

Edi ted by

ART H U R F . K I N N E Y

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRE S S