Ann’s is the slightly better case. If Shakespeare had kept a manservant in London, and wished to stay in the house in London, he would have. Part of the point of returning to New Place for good must have been to have the benefit of Ann’s housekeeping and later her nursing. Whenever he went up to London, Ann and her maids might have moved in to set his chamber to rights, and she may have spent long hours sorting his papers, reading his plays and imagining what they would have been like in the theatre. Perhaps they had been read to her as they were written, and she read the revised versions with interest. Or perhaps she was ashamed and disgusted by her husband’s connection with the theatre, and preferred to regard it as nothing to do with her or her daughters.
On the face of it, the person who concerned himself with Shakespeare’s papers should have been Thomas Greene who was a student at the Middle Temple in the years of Shakespeare’s greatest triumph, but in the last years of Shakespeare’s life that relationship seems to have become distant, as he drew closer to two other Middle Templars, William and John Combe, either or both of whom could have been involved in the Folio project. John Hall was certainly aware of his father-in-law as the most successful playwright of his day, but he was surely too deeply imbued with Calvinist values actually to have risked exposing himself to the corrupting influence of the theatre, or to commit himself to the labour of keeping his father-in-law’s playscripts intact and together. It would be pleasing to think of Susanna or Judith as fans of their father’s work and eager to preserve his reputation but we don’t know whether either of them ever travelled to London. It is not clear whether Shakespeare would have wanted them in a playhouse, given the promiscuous mix of people they were likely to encounter. Ladies of reputation, especially unmarried ones, seldom visited the public playhouses. We should probably not exclude Susanna from consideration as her father’s literary executor, but as she and her husband were already Shakespeare’s chief and residuary legatees, he might well have bethought him of someone else. If Judith Quiney was illiterate—she certainly could not sign her own name—her husband was not.
Ann has as good a case as any of them. As good, but no better. Though the Folio was advertised as newly published in 1622 it didn’t actually appear until the end of 1623, four months or so after Ann’s death. For the earlier date to have been at all feasible, work on collating and standardising the texts would have had to have begun many months before, in 1620, say, or even earlier. Supposing Ann had had copies in her possession, she would not have surrendered them before she knew that someone she trusted was seriously committed to issuing the volume. That person could have been an old friend from childhood days in Shottery. What would have decided the issue would have been providing him with the funds to finance or part-finance the project. According to the colophon of Cymbeline in the First Folio it was ‘Printed at the charges of W. Jaggard, Ed[ward] Blount, J[ohn] Smithwick and W. Aspley’. The printing was done in the Jaggards’ shop, and Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount seem to have been the publishers but whether they bore the whole of the considerable cost is unknown: ‘they are unlikely to have been the prime movers. In fact it is doubtful whether they would have been much interested when it was first proposed unless offered substantial incentives, though not necessarily financial ones, by the players.’ 7 It seems more likely to me that the printers and publishers would have needed indemnities rather than incentives—that is, as Charlton Hinman says in the introduction to the Norton facsimile, ‘some kind of guarantee against disastrous loss’. The King’s Men had absolutely nothing to gain and would have been ill advised to throw their money away. But somebody must have.
Scholars who need to think of Shakespeare as a self-conscious artist are rather too keen to find evidence that he was involved in the preparation of the volume. He may have had time between his retirement from the stage and the onset of his last illness to give some thought to such a project. The precedent had been set by Jonson, who was certainly the designer and leader of the project to publish his own ‘works’, which he undertook at about the time Shakespeare is thought to have left London to take up permanent residence in Stratford. The notion that Ben Jonson was a crony in the last years of Shakespeare’s life and that Shakespeare would have wished to follow the precedent set by The Works of Benjamin Jonson, which Chambers and Greg both entertained, would be easier to countenance if Shakespeare had followed Jonson’s example in anything else, which he didn’t. There was no attempt to include non-dramatic verse in the Shakespeare Folio, as Jonson had done, and it was called simply Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. Again, if we try to put Ann in the picture, we can too easily understand why she would not wish for the sonnets to be reprinted, or even Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Other booksellers had rights in these, but a deal could have been done and those rights acquired. The narrative poems were obviously connected with Southampton, the sonnets rather less so. Another odd thing about the Folio is that it was dedicated not to Southampton, but to the puritan lords William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and his brother Philip, Earl of Montgomery. Southampton evidently accepted the role of patron to Shakespeare; he paid forty shillings to the company for reviving Richard II at the Globe in 1599 and had them perform Love’s Labour’s Lost before Anne of Denmark at Southampton House in 1603. In 1610 Southampton had fallen out with Montgomery at a tennis match, where they belted each other about the head with their wooden racquets, so the choice could be interpreted as a snub to Southampton.
W. W. Greg asks, more or less rhetorically, ‘In the quiet evening of his days at New Place, did Shakespeare ever discuss the possibility of printing with the cronies who visited him there?’8 Who can these cronies have been? It is usually presumed that they were Richard Burbage, John Hemmings and Henry Condell who were each left £1 6s 8d each to buy mourning rings in Shakespeare’s will. After the death of Richard Burbage on 13 March 1619, John Hemmings and Henry Condell were the leading members of the King’s Men. Both men may have had Stratford connections. Malone certainly believed that the John Hemmings who edited the Folio was born in Shottery in about 1556, as was Ann Hathaway. 9 It will be remembered that a John Hemmings witnessed Ann’s father’s will in 1581. 10
John was a popular name in the Shottery Hemmings family; John Hemmingses were christened in Stratford in 1565, 1571 and 1574. In 1574 an older Hemmings had been hayward of Shottery, with the two-fold duty of guarding hedges against cattle or people breaking them down and impounding stray animals. Though some of the sturdier yeomen managed to consolidate viable estates in the arden, the waste lands filled up with the hovels of masterless men, some of whom had lost even their identity. The parish register records a series of deaths as simply ‘a poor young man from Shottery’ in December 1599 and again in January 1600, and ‘an infant from Shottery of a poor man’s’ (1607). By 1600, the presence of the Hemmings family in Shottery was much diminished. Like many others displaced by the engrossing of agricultural estates the Hemmingses may have gravitated to London.
The John ‘Heminge’ who collaborated with Condell in the compilation of the Folio is supposed to be the same John Hemmings who was a member of the Queen’s Men when they visited Stratford in 1586. By 1587 he was living in London. After the actor William Knell was killed in a brawl with another player, ‘John Hemminge, gent, of Cornhil’’ was granted a licence on 5 March 1588 at St Mary the Virgin Aldermanbury to marry Rebecca, widow of ‘William Knell, gent.’ From then on he was associated with Aldermanbury where Condell was a churchwarden and where he too eventually served as a sidesman.11 The first of John and Rebecca Hemmings’s fourteen children was christened John at Aldermanbury on 2 April 1588. A daughter Thomasine, born in 1595, was married to William Ostler, a player with the King’s Men, in 1611; their son was christened Beaumont at Aldermanbury on 18 May 1612. As part of the marriage settlement, Ostler had been given shares in both Blackfriars and the Globe. When Ostler died at the end of 1614, his widow tried to cash in the shares, and ended up in litigation with her father who denied he
r valuation of £600. Hemmings’s ninth child, William, was educated at Westminster and went up to Oxford as a king’s scholar. Hemmings died in 1630. The possibility that Hemmings had been a childhood playmate of Ann Shakespeare raises the further possibility that when her young husband set off for London to ply his poetry he knew where to go and whom to see about a career in the theatre. The very suggestion will raise guffaws in university common-rooms, but the possibility remains, nonetheless.
Not much is known about Henry Condell, who married an heiress in 1596, when he is thought to have been about twenty. One of the trustees of the Globe was another churchwarden at Aldermanbury, William Leveson. Aldermanbury, not far from the Moorgate, was as distant from the Bankside as it was possible to get and still be in London, and it was not much nearer Blackfriars; the Aldermanbury connection has yet to be fully investigated.
We know from a warrant of 2 October 1599 for payment of £30 ‘for three interludes or plays played before her majesty on St Stephens Day at night, New Year’s Day at night, and Shrove Tuesday at night last past’ to Hemmings and Thomas Pope that Hemmings was by then a shareholder in the Chamberlain’s Company. At some point, between 1605 and 1608, Henry Condell joined as a shareholder in the Globe. Both bought a share of the Blackfriars in 1608. When Shakespeare bought the house in Blackfriars, and mortgaged it for part of the purchase price, Hemmings and Condell were trustees and co-tenants.
If Shakespeare had discussed with Hemmings and Condell the possibility of printing an edition of his plays, we might wonder what took them so long. They were representatives of the King’s Men: the company owned the plays and had the sole right to sell the playtexts to a publisher. When we consider that for the company there was no advantage to be gained by printing their playtexts which then became available to every cry of players, we must ask ourselves why Hemmings and Condell undertook such a project when they did. What they said in their dedicatory letter was that they did it ‘only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive, as was our Shakespeare’. The best way to keep his memory alive, one would have thought, would have been to stage his plays but, in the winter of 1620–1, of eleven performances at court by the King’s Men, the only play by Shakespeare to be performed was an adaptation of Twelfth Night, called ‘Malvolio’, and apparently an anti-puritan satire.
Shakespeare’s reputation was fading fast. Michael Drayton, writing ‘Of Poets and Poesy’ to Henry Reynolds c.1625, had more to say about Spenser, Sidney, Warner, Marlowe, Nashe, Daniel, Chapman, Jonson, Sylvester and Sandys than he did of Shakespeare. 12 Fifteen years or so later William Cartwright could assure John Fletcher:
Shakespeare to thee was dull, whose best jest lies
I’the Lady’s questions and the Fool’s replies,
Old-fashioned wit which-walked from town to town
In turnèd hose, which our fathers called the Clown,
Whose wit our nice times would obsceneness call,
And which made bawdry pass for comical.
Nature was all his art. Thy vein was free
As his, but without his scurrility.13
In 1622 the King’s Men visited Stratford and were paid six shillings not to perform. ‘What brought them for once and now to Shakespeare’s native town and home and burial-place?…but to pay homage to the man and his monument and to receive “papers” without a blot on them, from his Widow and Daughter and Son-in-law at New Place?’14
It would not have taken a company of twelve persons or more to collect Shakespeare’s papers, or three people to give them away for that matter. What it would have taken to print the Folio was money. The printing of large-paper folios was expensive. Somehow money had to be made available up front for the acquisition of paper, still an extremely expensive commodity, and the setting of the print. The sales of such bulky and expensive volumes were bound to be slow. Later generations would deal with this problem by raising subscriptions, but Hemmings and Condell did not have that option. The mildly facetious letter ‘To the great variety of readers’ signed in full ‘John Heminge and Henrie Condell’ makes quite clear that the publishers were anxious to recoup what they had outlaid.
From the most able to him that can but spell, there you are numbered. We had rather you were weighed, especially when the fate of books depends upon your capabilities, and not of your heads alone, but of your purses. Well! It is now public and you will stand for your privileges we know, to read and censure. Do so, but buy it first. That doth best commend a book, the stationer says. Then, how odd soever your brains be or your wisdoms, make your licence the same and spare not. Judge your sixpenn’orth, your shillingsworth, your five shillings worth at a time, or higher, so you rise to the just rates, and welcome. But, whatever you do, buy.
This is so strangely apologetic that the reader might be pardoned for doubting the seriousness of the editors’ commitment to the project. Modern scholarship, assuming that the printers had to cover their costs, has arrived at a retail price for the First Folio of £1, which for most people would have been prohibitive. The poet’s ‘friends’ are credited with compiling and collating the works with ‘care and pain’,
and so to have published them, as where, before, you were abused with diverse stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious imposters that exposed them, even those are now offered to your view cured and perfect of their limbs and all the rest, absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them.
Though the editors do not claim to have had autograph manuscripts for their copytexts, they imply as much: ‘And what he thought, he uttered with such easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.’ Scribal copies are necessarily blot-free; a professional copyist who makes a mistake has to throw away his page and start again. If the absence of blots is worthy of remark it is because what the editors had was written in the poet’s own hand, described on the title-page of the Folio as ‘the true, original copies’. They claim elsewhere that their texts are ‘truly set forth, according to their first original. In the theatre the whole play was the copytext for scribal copies of parts, and the platts listing entrances and exits that were used by the stage managers. These multiple copies were costly to generate and would not have been thrown away. Whether companies were as careful with their copies of whole plays is not clear. Certainly, printers threw away their copytexts, whether they were autograph or not. The puzzle remains, if Shakespeare’s texts were not all in one place, under the control of the King’s Men, where could they have been? Some may have been in the Blackfriars house, though it seems that Shakespeare never lived there, but surely some must have been at New Place. If any papers had been at New Place or in Ann’s keeping, it is most unlikely that they would have found their way back there after they had been used by the printer, so whatever papers remained in Stratford after the Folio appeared were not the Folio copytexts.
The Frankfurt book fair was already up and running in 1622, when it was held twice yearly, in spring and autumn. The English version of the catalogue for October 1622 lists ‘Plays written by M. William Shakespeare, all in one volume, printed by Isaac Jaggard in folio’. Printing had in fact begun in the summer of 1621, and it is thought that the assembling of the texts must date from at least a year earlier. However, the Folio was not entered in the Stationers’ Register until 8 November 1623. The point of entering copyright in the Stationers’ Register was to prevent anyone else from uttering the same text; leaving the entry so late in the lengthy production process implies an absence of competition and no risk whatever of piracy.
In the First Folio of 1623 there are thirty-six plays, eighteen of them never before published. Of the others six had been published in bad quartos and the Folio text is superior; three had been published in doubtful quartos and the Folio text is no better; and in eleven cases the Folio text is based on the published quarto. It seems clear from this that there was no single source of the Folio copytexts. Textually the Folio had more than one begetter, but ther
e may have been only one angel who provided the money to set it up and that could have been Ann Shakespeare, anonymous as usual.
The fact that the Folio was reprinted nine years later is usually taken to mean that the first print-run sold out, yet no mention of the Folio can be found in any documented contemporary collection. Indeed, the copy sent for deposit in the Bodleian was so little regarded that it was sold when the second edition appeared in 1632. 15 We have no idea what the original print-run can have been; 500 copies is considered too few because it would result in too high a unit cost, while 1,500 was the legal maximum. 16 Two hundred and thirty copies are known to survive. This fact itself suggests that the First Folio was not much read, certainly not as Venus and Adonis was, for example; as we have seen, virtually all of the copies of the more than eleven editions of Venus and Adonis were read to pieces. The First Folio is the kind of volume that is presented to all kinds of luminaries, who accept it with thanks but don’t read it. One is reminded of the folios vanity-published by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle and sent to every educational institution in the country, where they are still, in pristine condition.
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