by Andrea Mays
For now, Heminges and Condell and their memories of Will had not exited the scene. They had seen him as a “poor player” who “struts and frets his hour upon the stage.” They had watched with their own eyes the first time Hamlet encountered his father’s ghost; they had heard the first time that Will the actor, playing the slain King Hamlet, spoke these haunting lines to his son: “The glowworm shows the matin to be near, / And ’gins to pale his uneffectual fire. / Adieu, adieu, adieu! Remember me.”11 Later, as they labored on the First Folio, did Heminges and Condell hear Shakespeare’s voice echoing that entreaty across the years?
Thus, when complete and accurate source material did not exist, Heminges’s and Condell’s recollections proved invaluable. They knew their fellow’s idiosyncratic language and allusions. They had seen him standing in the wings, directing or watching a rehearsal. They knew how he had instructed them to deliver a line, how or when to enter, running or staggering, when to kiss the maiden, how to menace a Roman nobleman with a dagger, fight with a sword, or when to exit, pursued by a bear.
They were present at the creation. In their daily routine they had lived the privileged life that modern Shakespearian scholars might sell their souls to experience: Shakespeare onstage playing two simultaneous roles—artwork and artist, performer and author—speaking the lines he had written. They had seen wonders that a legion of scholars burrowing in one hundred libraries can never recover. How long did it take Shakespeare to write a play? What did his manuscripts look like? Which were his favorites? How did he intend his lines to be read? Was it, in Macbeth, for instance, an urgent “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” or the more languid “to morrow, to morrow, and to morrow”? (Act V, scene v, lines 19–20). On the page, such variants might read as a minor difference of no consequence; on the stage, spoken aloud for the ear, such differences might alter the whole mood of a line or scene.
Of course the First Folio, especially its eighteen hitherto unpublished plays, could never have been conjured up by Heminges and Condell from memory alone. But their recollections must have, in ways that we will never fully know, been indispensable in the making of the book.
By the fall of 1622, they had assembled sufficient source materials to allow them to go forward with the publication. If they had waited any longer, it might never have been printed. Within a generation, a Puritan dark age of antitheatrical mania, an attempt to “appease and avert the wrath of God,” would create an eighteen-year gap in theater history. There would be no stage performances to keep the plays alive, no passing of Shakespeare’s torch from one generation of actors to the next. By 1660, and the renaissance of English theater under the patronage of Charles II, it would have been too late; the age of Shakespeare’s King’s Men would have long passed, and with it all hope of recovering what, a generation earlier, Heminges and Condell had saved.
Chapter 3
“Whatever You Do, Buy”
—JOHN HEMINGES, HENRY CONDELL “TO THE GREAT VARIETY OF READERS”
IF HEMINGES and Condell wanted to publish a book in London, there seemed only one place to go: the plaza surrounding St. Paul’s Cathedral. It was to seventeenth-century English publishing what Broadway in New York City and the West End in London are to the theater today: the symbol of an entire industry. All aspects of publishing, from printing to binding to bookselling, were crowded into Paul’s Cross Churchyard. The Crown regulated the printing industry to control the dissemination of ideas. It limited the number of presses, as well as their locations, to facilitate censorship of dangerous ideas, particularly to protect the Crown from sedition and heresy, and to protect the economic interests of the guild members.
Booksellers also occupied Paternoster Row, the street just north of St. Paul’s. Other printers established themselves just beyond the city walls, at the corner of the Barbican and Aldersgate. Here was the shop of printer William Jaggard, at the sign of the Half Eagle and Key. Heminges and Condell needed no introduction to this printer. Indeed, given the Passionate Pilgrim and Pavier Quarto or “false folio” episodes, there were a number of reasons for Shakespeare’s friends to shun Jaggard’s shop. And yet Heminges and Condell chose him to print their collection of Shakespeare’s plays. Several business and professional reasons justified their otherwise inexplicable choice. For better or worse, the players already knew him, and he enjoyed the Queen’s and then the King’s grant of a monopoly for printing theater playbills. Jaggard had been appointed Printer to the City of London, a privilege that gave him, for a fee, the right to print proclamations, “Acts of Coen Counsell and other matters for the service of this Cittie.”1 He had undertaken other large book publishing projects, so Heminges and Condell knew his two-press shop could handle the enormity of the task. And they knew he could negotiate with his business associate—the same Thomas Pavier of the “false folio” episode—for rights Pavier had acquired to four of Shakespeare’s plays that they wished to include in their project. It was not the first time a printer had been awarded a job based on the rights he controlled. And so, Heminges and Condell went into business with the blind printer William Jaggard and his son, Isaac.
Heminges and Condell obtained permission from members of the Stationers’ Company who had earlier registered and printed some of the plays in quarto form and therefore controlled the right to print them. They paid the King’s Men for the rights to publish the plays the company owned. William Aspley and John Smethwick traded the right to publish plays they controlled in exchange for a share of the project’s profits. Heminges and Condell’s inability to acquire the rights to Troilus and Cressida and Pericles led to their exclusion from the collection. The former eventually received a reprieve and was printed in the First Folio, while the inability to agree on rights to the latter made it the sole Shakespeare play excluded from the collection.
The plays were not the only material that the editors included in the First Folio. They solicited authors—from minor poet Leonard Digges to Shakespeare’s illustrious friend, playwright Ben Jonson—to compose memorial poems. These works varied widely in quality and ranged in tone from elegiac to hagiographic. Heminges and Condell themselves made four contributions to the front matter: a catalogue of the plays, a roster of the principal actors who had performed in them, a dedication, and a memorial essay which was a personal tribute to their friend. Hoping they might attract financial support from two earls, they dedicated the book to them. This collection of material, earmarked for the front of the Folio, became known as the “preliminaries.”
Their choice of folio format was part solution to a practical problem, part artistic statement. In a folio-size book, a single sheet of paper measuring thirteen by eighteen inches is printed on both sides with text from a play, and folded once in half to yield four printed pages in the final book. Publishing Shakespeare’s plays in folio size would result in a nine-hundred-plus-page volume measuring approximately nine by thirteen inches. This was a massive tome for its time, but it could still be bound into a single volume that a reader could hold in his hands, open, and turn the pages without cracking the spine. The First Folio could not have been printed in a smaller format and still be contained in one volume. Heminges and Condell could have elected to print the plays in smaller, quarto size, resulting in a book measuring approximately six by nine inches. But in quarto the thirteen-by-eighteen sheet is folded twice at right angles, resulting in eight pages per sheet. Thus, a nine-hundred-page folio-size work, when reduced to quarto, would be eighteen hundred pages and twice as thick, making it impossible to bind into a single volume.
Although folio was the only practical way to print a book of so many plays in a single volume in manageable size, the folio format was likely to provoke some controversy. By tradition, publishing in folio signified that the content was of serious historical or intellectual importance—reference works, religious and political works, or the collected writings of important and serious authors. It was almost unheard of for plays to enjoy such a prestigious format.
In 1616, Poet Laureate and popular playwright Ben Jonson supervised the publication of a folio collection of his writings, Workes. The volume was prefaced with dedicatory verses, including three by Francis Beaumont, and it contained plays, poems, masques, epigrams, and entertainments. It had the distinction of being the first folio-sized book that included plays. A Puritan antitheatricalist, William Prynne, lamented the publication of mere entertainments in that format, complaining that “some Play-books . . . are growne from Quarto into Folio.”2 Jonson’s critics accused him of claiming a higher, more exalted status for his plays than they deserved. He was ridiculed for mistaking the difference between “workes” and “playes.” One cheeky fellow wrote:
To Mr. Ben Jonson, demanding the reason
Why he call’d his playes works.
Pray tell me Ben, where doth the mystery lurke,
What others call a play you call a worke,
Thus answer’d by a friend in Mr.
Jonson’s defense.
The authors friend thus for the author sayes,
Bens plays are works, when others works are plaies.3
Heminges and Condell’s choice of supersize format risked inciting similar mockery. Perhaps it was Jonson’s Workes that inspired them to print Shakespeare’s plays in one complete, impressive, and expensive volume. After they chose the format, they had to decide how many copies to print. Once Jaggard started to manufacture the book, its print run would, for technical limitations, be unalterable. The publisher and editors did not have the luxury of knowing in advance whether the First Folio would sell out quickly, unlike a famous text published twelve years earlier, which was destined to be a bestseller. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, Puritans in Parliament proposed a new translation of the Bible. In 1604, the year after King James ascended to the throne, forty-seven writer-scholars began the work. Published in 1611, it sold out quickly. It would become the most important nonsecular work in the English language.
Expectations for the First Folio were more modest. If Jaggard printed too few copies—just a couple of hundred—the cost per book would be high, and the booksellers could not charge enough per copy to earn a profit. If they printed too many—more than one thousand—it might take years to sell enough copies just to cover the costs. They had to estimate how many copies they believed they could sell and assume the risk of the cost of time, paper, ink, and labor. Heminges and Condell wished to reach as wide an audience as possible, educated or barely literate, “From the most able, to him that can but spell.”4 Based on these economic considerations, scholars have estimated the size of the print run to be around 750 copies.5 It was both a leap of faith and a vote of confidence in the marketability of their friend’s plays—not just for performance, but also for reading. And this in a country where the literacy rate for males was below thirty percent.
Printing the First Folio required a lot of paper. A print run of 750 copies contained 225 sheets per book, totaling 168,750 sheets. Jaggard did not store that much at his shop, nor would he have tied up funds in such a large stock over the many months it would take to complete the print job. It would have to be imported and it would be expensive; good-quality rag paper was not manufactured in England, so it would have to come from Normandy. Most books printed during the seventeenth century in England were printed on handmade Normandy rag paper. It began its life as discarded rags and clothing, and then, after cleaning, bleaching, soaking, and boiling in quicklime, it became the liquid “stuff” that the papermakers scooped into trays, drained, then dried on felt.
The paper used to print the First Folio was of medium quality, one hundred percent rag, with a supple but substantial feel, and a crown watermark. A watermark is a distinct decorative shape or pattern visible when the paper is held up to the light, with some areas allowing more light to pass through than others because of the different thickness of “stuff” scooped into a mold where a wire ornament has been placed. The wire ornament embosses the fibers of the paper, making them thinner in some areas than others. Prior to printing, the paper was creased down the middle of the long side, to make it easier to drape while drying. In comparison to the Normandy paper, the modern paper used in books today feels tissue-thin. The Puritan William Prynne, so bothered by the status that folio size conferred on the First Folio, was also disturbed that it was printed on such fine-quality paper, complaining “with grief” that “Shackspeers Plaies” are “printed on farre better paper than most Octavo or Quarto Bibles.”6
Jaggard’s shop, equipped with two presses and staffed by more than a half dozen employees, had a variety of typefaces from which to choose. The Shakespeare folio would be typeset in well-worn type, in two columns per page, with running titles at the top of each page of text. Skilled workmen called compositors sorted each individual letter of metal type into its standard assigned place in a “case.” The “case” was an array of small wooden boxes, placed on a table on a slant within easy reach of the compositor. Each letter had its own compartment; more frequently used letters required more copies of the type. Standing before the case, the compositor, holding a composing stick in his left hand, placed the type into the rectangular trench in the composing stick, placing each letter next to the previous, forming words, then lines. When a line of text was complete, the compositor would fill any leftover space at the end of the line with spacers. This process is called justifying. The line of type was lifted from the stick, placed on a wooden board, and the next line of text composed, and then placed on the board below the previous line. To make the printed text read correctly from left to right, the letters and words were composed backward. Once two pages were set, they were placed on a flat surface within an iron frame, the chase. The pages thus arranged, and the frame tightened with screws or wooden wedges called quoins, the whole apparatus, called a forme, was moved to the press, where a proof was pulled to check for errors and make corrections.
A proof was a single sheet held in a tray called a galley. By removing the sheet through an open side of the galley, the printer or one of his employees could mark corrections on the proof sheet while the printing of pages continued. Each uncorrected sheet that came off the press was hung to dry. A worker marked the proof sheet with proofreaders’ marks: carats for insertions, strikeouts through text for deletions, marks to insert or delete a space, or to change a letter or word. Next, compositors corrected the galleys, removing, rotating, or adding type as necessary. The high price of paper meant that proof sheets containing mistakes were not discarded, but included in the finished book. The end result was that a particular page of a play exists in one of three possible states: the uncorrected page, a single proof sheet with corrections marked by hand, and corrected pages with errors fixed by having reset the type. These three states were intermingled, stacked, and collected into quires—four or six sheets of paper folded once and gathered together. Jaggard’s employees sewed together the gathered pages. The process of making corrections while the printing was under way explains the numerous printed errors that appear in the book.7
Once the compositor had reset the type with corrections, the final, corrected state of the sheet could be printed. Between printing the front and back—the recto and verso—of a sheet, they were dried, hung on strings stretched across the print shop or from rounded battens extending from the walls of the shop. The employees used a long-handled wooden paddle to hang the wet sheets as though draping a bedsheet over a clothesline.
Jaggard did not print the pages of the First Folio in sequential order, from beginning to end. Instead, he and his workers typeset the text from the middle, backward and forward to the first and last pages of each quire. In other words, each quire of the First Folio was printed from the middle out. The pages of a quire of six would be printed in the order 1, 2, 11, 12, 3, 4, 9, 10, 5, 6, 7, 8. A compositor estimated how much text would fit on each page, and in a process called casting off he would typeset the pages, starting with the two middle pages of the quire. The process was more prone to error if the source w
as in manuscript or, if printed, had a number of insertions and emendations. If the compositor incorrectly estimated the amount of text that would fit on a page of a quire, he compensated for his error. If he had too much text to fit on a page, he had to cram the text into the allotted space by deleting line breaks, omitting or altering printer’s decorations, converting poetry to prose, or otherwise modifying—even excising—text to fit into its allotted space. If he had too little text to fill a page, he added blank lines, divided complete lines in two, or inserted ornaments until the page was filled. The printer set “catchwords” to help him correctly sequence the pages as they were printed, and later, after they were dried, when they were gathered: the same word appeared at the bottom of a page, below and separate from the last line of text, and as the first word printed in the text of the next page.
Two men worked each press. One pressman smeared ink onto one of two big, soft inking balls made of stuffed animal skin and, by a series of gymnastic manipulations, spread the viscous substance evenly over the surface of both balls. Next, he “beat” the forme by daubing ink onto the type in uniform thickness, neither missing spots nor leaving excess ink on any portion of the type. The ink, made of boiled oil and lampblack, had to be sufficiently gooey that it did not drip off the surface of the type. It took some skill to ink a forme properly: if a pressman applied too much ink, indentations within letters filled in, resulting in letters called monks. Application of too little ink resulted in weak or invisible letters, called friars. The other pressman, careful not to touch the ink, placed the clean sheet of paper on the press and maneuvered the forme beneath the plate of the press. When the pressman pulled a bar attached to the screw, the plate was pressed against the paper, and the ink that coated the type was transferred onto the paper, creating an image and making a three-dimensional printed impression.8