by Andrea Mays
The popularity of Shakespeare’s plays inspired pirates to publish unauthorized quartos of several of them, and in 1599 a brazen London printer and bookseller, William Jaggard, gathered and published what he claimed was a collected group of Shakespeare’s poetry. The bold fraud, titled The Passionate Pilgrim, was a collection of various poems, some actually written by Shakespeare, followed by another set of works that Jaggard labeled “sonnets” (none of them fourteen lines long and thus not true sonnets at all) which he attributed to William Shakespeare. Today, scholars accept only five of the twenty pieces as authentic Shakespeare compositions. Jaggard had lifted three lyrics from the play Love’s Labour’s Lost and had somehow purloined the other two from Shakespeare’s own private, unpublished collection of sonnets. Hedging, Jaggard also included in the volume another fifteen poems that he implied were written by Shakespeare, but were not. Shakespeare was not amused. One of his contemporaries wrote, “The author I know [is] much offended by M. Jaggard . . . that (altogether unknown to him) presumed to make so bold with his name.”9
The queen died in 1603, but fortunately for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, England’s new ruler, King James I, also loved plays. He granted a royal patent—similar to a franchise—to Shakespeare’s troupe and changed its name to the King’s Men, sealing the company’s premier place at court. It performed there about twelve times a year. Shakespeare continued to act. In 1603 he appeared on the cast list of “principal tragedians” in Ben Jonson’s Sejanus. Although it was his last documented stage performance, as late as 1608 Cuthbert Burbage, Richard’s brother, listed Shakespeare among the “men players” who arranged to begin using the Blackfriars Theatre. That word, players, suggests that perhaps he acted longer than we know.10 With or without Shakespeare onstage, the new king savored his plays. In the winter of 1604–5, James I watched performances of Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Othello, Measure for Measure, Henry V, and The Merchant of Venice, the last of which he insisted on seeing twice.
By 1608, when Shakespeare was forty-four years old, the catalogue of his plays included Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, Macbeth, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra. It had been a miraculous fourteen-year run, unmatched in the history of the English theater. As other Jacobean dramatists—talented rivals like Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher, and Francis Beaumont—came into vogue, Shakespeare responded with his late plays, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Tempest, and The Winter’s Tale.
On May 20, 1609, another rogue printer, Thomas Thorpe, listed “a Booke called Shakespeares sonnettes” in the Stationers’ Register and published it in quarto, as Jaggard had done in 1599, without Shakespeare’s authorization or supervision. It was sold by William Aspley, whose bookshop, the Parrot, was in the churchyard of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Contemporary accounts provide little information about the printing history of these “sonnettes,” aside from the name of the publisher and the price of the book. But this time, at least, the poems were authentic. The handwritten sonnets had been circulated by Shakespeare privately in manuscript form only among his friends. It remains a mystery how they ever got into a printer’s hands. The poems also served as private homage to royals who, he hoped, would become financial patrons. Francis Meres, a churchman, scholar, and theater enthusiast of the time, wrote in a commonplace book about how “the sweet, witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare: witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared Sonnets among his private friends.”11
And then, by 1610 or 1611, it was over. One of the last plays Shakespeare wrote, The Winter’s Tale, a melancholy conjuring trick of loss, memory, and regret over the passage of time, which ends with a magical resolution where past becomes present, stands as a coda to Shakespeare’s career. It had been a grand one, spanning almost twenty years. Unlike so many of his peers, he had survived the vicissitudes of life and death in seventeenth-century England, and his talent had endured. He had proven that he was more than a brilliant flash in the pan. He had written five long poems, 154 sonnets, and thirty-seven plays.12 He had not become famous in his lifetime because of his “readers”—his popularity resulted solely from the public performance of his plays and his reputation as an excellent comic and tragic actor. Then he just walked away, and retired to Stratford, to New Place, at the corner of Chapel Lane and Chapel Street, to enjoy his impressive home and its surrounding grounds.
But he could not resist the lure of keeping his hand in the game. Shakespeare continued to dabble with playwriting. In 1613 he collaborated with his protégé John Fletcher, who had followed in his footsteps as in-house writer to the King’s Men, on Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and Cardenio. But his greatest days were behind him.
On June 29, 1613, a theatrical disaster symbolized the end of his run, and destroyed the company’s most valuable assets with it: its costumes and the prompt copies of its plays. The theater had long used cannons for special effects during performances. Situated beneath the thatched roof in the attic in the “heavens”—an area above the stage—cannon fire was used to punctuate dramatic entrances. Loaded with gunpowder and wadding, the cannon was fired during Act I, Scene iv, to announce the arrival of the character Henry VIII during a performance of one of Shakespeare’s own plays, All Is True, an early version of the play we now know as Henry VIII.13
An eyewitness account written in a letter by Sir Henry Wotton a few days after the fire, on July 2, 1613, recalled the events:
The King’s players had a new play called All is True, representing some principal pieces of the reign of Henry the Eighth, which set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty even to the matting of the stage. . . . Now King Henry making a Masque at the Cardinal Wolsey’s house, and certain cannons being shot off at his entry, some of the paper or other stuff, wherewith one of them was stopped, did light on the thatch, where being thought at first but idle smoak, and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole house to the very ground.
No human casualties were recorded, except for “only one man [who] had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broiled him, if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit, put it out with a bottle of ale.”
Three years later, 1616, was another bad year for London’s theater community. Impresario Philip Henslowe and playwright Francis Beaumont died. Beaumont, at least, had reached the social stature necessary for burial in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, where he took his place near legendary poet Edmund Spenser, who had died in 1599.14 On April 23, Shakespeare died. Half of his plays existed only in pirated, corrupted, and bastardized printings far removed from his original language, which would, without action, soon become extinct.
Even worse, the other half of his plays—eighteen works, including some of his greatest—had never been published in any form and were about to vanish into “airy nothing.”15 So, on that sad day in April 1616, William Shakespeare’s grave claimed his body, and was prepared to do the same with his words. Unless, that is, someone found and saved them.
Chapter 2
“Adieu . . . Remember Me”
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet
SHAKESPEARE’S WILL directed the distribution of his worldly goods. To his daughter Susanna Hall he left the home at New Place, presumably subject to the life tenancy of his widow, Anne, along with all his other real estate interests. To his daughter Judith he left a sum of cash and “my broad silver gilt bowle”; to his granddaughter Elizabeth Hall he left his “silver and plate.” To Thomas Combe he left his sword. To his Stratford friend Hamnet Sadler and to William Raynoldes, “gentleman,” he left money for memorial rings. And to three of his theatrical comrades, “my fellowes John Hemynges, Richard Burbage, and Henry Cundell,” he set aside twenty-six shillings and eight denarius each to “buy them ringes” to wear in remembrance of him.1
Shakespeare’s sword, gilt bowl, silver, and plate would be prized relics today,
but they are long lost, either destroyed or divorced from their historical provenance and unrecognizable today as his property. The same is true of the rings Shakespeare left his friends. Surviving examples from the period suggest that these were not ordinary, decorative pieces of jewelry. Fashioned from gold, such rings bore sober signs of death: skulls, bones, or other symbols of mourning.
Who were these three “fellowes,” to merit such gifts? Richard Burbage was the son of the great theater owner and entrepreneur James Burbage. Richard, a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the King’s Men, was the most famous actor in England, playing—indeed, creating—the lead roles in Hamlet, Richard III, Othello, and King Lear. He also excelled in plays by Ben Jonson and other dramatists. Like Shakespeare he was more than just an actor. He was a businessman, too—a shareholder along with Shakespeare in the King’s Men and also, with his brother Cuthbert, an owner of half of the Globe Theatre.
John Heminges and Henry Condell, fellow shareholders with Burbage and Shakespeare in the King’s Men, had been actors in various companies since the 1590s, ending up as members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men around 1597 or 1598.2 These memory keepers were privileged members of the small band of stage brothers who actually saw with their own eyes Shakespeare’s fugitive handwritten manuscripts, and who acted in the plays under the author’s eye, receiving from him coaching as well as stage direction.
Heminges’s acting career began before he met Shakespeare, and there is evidence that he performed in a number of Ben Jonson’s plays—Every Man in His Humour, Every Man out of His Humour, Sejanus, Volpone, The Alchemist, and Catiline. Though he was a competent actor he was limited by a stutter, but he appears to have had a talent for numbers and logistics, becoming, around 1611, an administrator for the troupe.3
Condell, the younger of the two, played Benvolio in Romeo and Juliet, Don Pedro in Much Ado about Nothing, Oliver in As You Like It, and Horatio in Hamlet. Although his name appears in the top ten of the King’s Men’s list of actors, he never matched the success of Richard Burbage. Heminges and Condell raised their families—Heminges had fourteen children, Condell nine—in the area around St. Mary Aldermanbury.
After the Globe Theatre burned down in 1613, a poem commemorated the tragedy. This piece, A Sonnet upon the pitiful burning of the Globe Playhouse in London, incorporated the names of Burbage, Heminges, and Condell into the verse, thus suggesting the trio’s prominence. Had Shakespeare not already retired, no doubt the text would have mentioned him, too.
This fearful fire began above
A wonder strange and true,
And to the stage-house did remove,
As round as tailor’s clew;
And burned down both beam and snag,
And did not spare the silken flag,
O sorrow, pitiful sorrow, and yet all this is true.
Out run the knights, out run the lords,
And there was great ado;
Some lost their hats and some their swords;
Then out run Burbage too;
The reprobates, though drunk on Monday,
Prayed for the Fool and Henry Condye,
O sorrow, pitiful sorrow, and yet all this is true.
The periwigs and drum heads fry
Like to a butter firkin;
A woeful burning did betide
To many a good buff jerkin.
Then with swoll’n eyes, like drunken Flemings,
Distressed stood old stuttering Heminges.
O sorrow, pitiful sorrow, and yet all this is true.4
Burbage, Heminges, and Condell did not need to behold their golden rings to recall their fond memories of William Shakespeare. Everywhere they turned, they were reminded of him: pursuing the theatrical life, performing for king and queen, living it up in London with dinners and drinks at the local tavern.
Three years after Shakespeare’s death, the fellows of the King’s Men suffered another loss. In March 1619, Richard Burbage died. He was only fifty-one, one year younger than Shakespeare had been when he died. EXIT BURBAGE, read his simple tombstone. More eloquent was the anonymous Funerall Elegye on the Death of the famous Actor Richard Burbage:
He’s gone and with him what a world are dead.
Which he review’d, to be revived so,
No more young Hamlet, Old Hieronimo
Kind Lear, the Grieved Moor, and more beside,
That lived in him have now forever died.5
The melancholy verse mourned not just the loss of a great actor; it foreshadowed the day when all the King’s Men would join Burbage—and Shakespeare—in the grave. When that happened, then Shakespeare’s world would truly be gone.
A few years after Shakespeare’s death, and probably no later than 1620, the year after Burbage died, Heminges and Condell conceived of a way (more permanent than rings) to remember William Shakespeare. It would make them the two most unsung heroes in the history of English literature. They decided to do what Shakespeare had never done for himself—they would publish a complete record of his dramatic works. Their motives did not include money or fame. They did not expect the book to become a bestseller, or to make them rich. They did it for love. Later, in a prefatory letter to the First Folio, “To the Great Variety of Readers,” they wrote that their objective was to compile Shakespeare’s work “without ambition either of self-profit or fame, only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare.” Through this book, which they would call Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, Heminges and Condell hoped to create a memorial more permanent than the golden rings on their fingers. In their prefatory letter they mourned that the author was not alive to publish his own plays. By publishing them for him, Heminges and Condell did more than honor a departed friend; they resurrected him from the grave. In time, it would have repercussions beyond their wildest imaginings.
But Heminges and Condell were not the first men to conceive of collecting Shakespeare’s plays between the covers of a book. In 1619, three years after Shakespeare’s death, there had been an aborted and unauthorized attempt to collect at least some of them. William Jaggard, earlier the perpetrator of the Passionate Pilgrim fraud of 1599, was hired to print an incomplete collection. This volume, not authorized by the King’s Men, who owned some of the plays, failed to live up to its intended purpose and ran afoul of the actors in the process.
This first attempt at collecting Shakespeare’s plays came to be known as the False Folio or the “Pavier Quarto,” named for its publisher. The name is confusing because the book was not in folio format at all. It contained only ten works, two of them—Sir John Oldcastle and A Yorkshire Tragedy—not written by Shakespeare at all. The others were Henry V; King Lear; The Merchant of Venice; The Merry Wives of Windsor; A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Pericles, Prince of Tyre; and a combined version of Henry VI Part 2 and Henry VI Part 3.
The printed book—slightly larger than a conventional quarto size—was sold at Thomas Pavier’s shop at the sign of the Cat and Parrots in Cornhill, a ward of London, in loose sheets or bound, with each play bound separately, or all of them together, per the customer’s choice. The endeavor quickly failed. Once the King’s Men, who held rights to some of the plays, became aware of the project, they, along with Heminges and Condell, shareholders who were possibly already planning their own publication, sought the assistance of a higher power to stop the project. The Lord Chamberlain intervened on behalf of the players, instructing the Stationers’ Company—a printer’s guild of which Jaggard was a member—“That no playes that his maiesties players do play shalbe printed without the consent of somme of them.”6 This order against unfair competition would ensure that any hitherto unpublished Shakespeare plays would not appear in print while the First Folio was being produced. But William Jaggard and Pavier, in an act of brazen deception, fraudulently backdated the title pages, making it appear the plays had been published years earlier, in 1608 instead of 1619.7
Perhaps the Pavier episode inspire
d Heminges and Condell to publish a legitimate volume. Or they might have had their own project in mind prior to the incident. Regardless, it would not be easy. Heminges and Condell confronted several obstacles. The fact that Shakespeare failed to publish his plays himself made the project immeasurably more difficult. The two actors had to locate a source—sometimes multiple and conflicting sources—for every play, half of which had never appeared in print before. Could reliable texts for all the plays even be found?
Shakespeare had never authorized the publication of any of his plays for two reasons. First, it simply was not the custom. Dramas were meant to be seen, not read. Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights thought of themselves as entertainers, not literary paragons. They did not write for all time, but for their own. In 1604, playwright John Marston published a comedy in which he conveyed the typical Elizabethan attitude toward publication: “Only one thing afflicts me, to think that scenes, invented merely to be spoken, should be enforcively published to read.” During Shakespeare’s lifetime common people went to the theater and saw his plays performed: they did not desire to go home and read them. And for a population that was largely illiterate, it was not possible for them to do so. Plays were public entertainment for the royals and for the masses, not serious literature.
The second reason is that playwrights, Shakespeare included, did not own the rights to their plays. The idea of intellectual property was in its infancy in early modern England. For a fee of two to five pounds, a play’s author sold all commercial rights to the theater company that would produce it. Writers did not license performance rights, nor did they retain for themselves separate publication or other rights. The idea of splitting intellectual property into a bundle of various rights to be sold or licensed off one by one, which is commonplace today, would have been incomprehensible to Elizabethan authors or theatrical companies. Had Shakespeare attempted to publish a collection of his own plays, the rights holders to whom he had sold them would have treated him no differently from any other infringer, and enlisted the help of the Company of Stationers to prevent the publication of “their” work. Shakespeare owned only a partial interest in whatever plays he had sold to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men or the King’s Men, not because he wrote them, but because he was a shareholder in the theater companies.