by Andrea Mays
When all 750 copies of the two pages of a forme were printed, the men cleaned the type with lye soap, rinsed it with water, dried it, unlocked it from the forme, and redistributed it to the case for use in composition of the next page. Some parts of the assembled type, such as the running titles printed above the text, head ornaments, and tailpieces, were used on multiple pages. Jaggard’s men tied these—called furniture—with string and set them aside for reuse. Once the compositors redistributed the type into the case, it was too late to go back and increase the print run. The composition began anew for the next forme, a process that the pressmen would have to repeat several hundred times before the First Folio printing job was complete. It would take centuries for scholars to discover the process and the order in which the First Folio was printed.
This printing process, already prone to error, required flexibility, and circumstances often led to improvisation. Pages of one play, Troilus and Cressida, were printed prematurely; Henry Walley, who had printed the play in quarto, had not given his permission to include it in the First Folio. Rather than discard the sheets containing one page of Troilus, the printers drew a big X across the superfluous page and continued printing the next play in the catalogue. The disfigured page was kept in the quire, and so some copies of the First Folio contain the canceled page. Troilus and Cressida was printed later and appears in some copies of the First Folio, but the title of the play is excluded from the Catalogue page in the preliminaries. Either Jaggard finally secured permission from Walley, or he decided to print it anyway.
Beginning in the fall of 1622, Jaggard and his men methodically typeset, printed, and assembled thousands of sheets of paper. It was a quiet process, mechanical, powered only by hand, slow, methodical, and rhythmic. It was still part art, part industry. The printing process would remain essentially the same, powered by the muscle of the pressmen, for hundreds of years. Machinery did not drown out the voices in the shop, or the sounds from London’s streets—the everyday cacophony of rolling carts, horses, and pedestrians.
The pressmen did not know that they were printing what would become the most important secular book in the English language. Although we do not know the names of all the men who set the type for the First Folio, we can identify their work. In the seventeenth century, spelling was not standardized: people often spelled the same word differently. For example, Shakespeare’s name was variously spelled as Shakspere, Shaxpere, Shaxberd, or other variants. Even in an era without standard spelling, each compositor tended to spell (or misspell) a given word consistently. For example, Compositor A would usually spell the same word the same way on each page he composed. But Compositor B might use a different spelling for the same word. From the records of Jaggard’s shop and the Stationers’ Company, scholars have identified at least two compositors and one apprentice. They have been given the code names of Compositors A, B, C, and so forth, plus the so-called Teenage Apprentice, whose identity scholars can only guess. Whatever his name, he was a youth exceedingly prone to error. Meticulous detective work has allowed scholars to infer which sets of hands composed which pages of the Folio. The image of these anonymous tradesmen slowly printing, gathering, and piling in stacks the pages of what would become, unbeknownst to them, one of the most important books in the world is a magical scene worthy of Shakespeare himself.
Other work on the First Folio proceeded elsewhere while Jaggard’s shop printed the pages. Heminges and Condell wanted to present Shakespeare’s image as well as his plays. For the first time in the history of English literature, an author’s portrait would become the central feature on a title page. True, other books had included author portraits, but not in such a prominent position. Heminges and Condell could have commissioned a cheap, crude woodcut portrait. But they went to extra effort to have their friend’s image engraved on a copper plate, to achieve a more detailed and accurate portrait. Why did they go to this trouble and additional expense? It was as though they were saying, “You cannot just have the words. You must behold the man.”
Just as they did not want Shakespeare’s words to vanish, they did not want his physical appearance to vanish, as Prospero said in The Tempest, “into thin air.” Thanks to them, we have the only authentic portrait of William Shakespeare. This illustration, the only one in the book, was executed by the twenty-two-year-old Flemish émigré engraver Martin Droeshout. The most recognizable extant image of Shakespeare, it was made neither from life nor by someone who had known or even seen Shakespeare. Engravers did not “sketch” or do “rough drafts” on metal. So Heminges and Condell must have supplied the engraver with more than a verbal description of their friend. Droeshout must have based his work upon some preexisting source, perhaps a drawing or even an oil painting, now long lost. Engravers were copyists, not police sketch artists.
The process for creating and printing an engraving differed substantially from the method for printing text, and Jaggard lacked the expertise and equipment necessary to execute the portrait. Another shop printed the engraving at the center of a blank page, then turned the sheets over to Jaggard, and he added the title and text that surrounded the portrait. The engraving left crisp images on the early impressions, but the soft copper surface of the plate wore down over time and had to be retouched or reengraved. To the untrained eye, one specimen of the portrait looks no different from another, but three “states” of the engraving exist. The three, laid side by side, vary slightly: the earliest state can be recognized by the absence of a shadow cast by Shakespeare’s hair on his ruffled collar. The second state has a shadow cross-hatched in, but lacks the little white lines at the centers of the pupils of Shakespeare’s eyes that identify the third state.
The composition is amateurish and has invited centuries of mockery. Shakespeare’s head seems to float above his body like a roast on a platter, and it appears that his tunic sprouts two left sleeves. Despite these shortcomings, Droeshout displayed his talent in the rendering of his subject’s face, creating what became one of the most recognizable and ubiquitous images in Western art.
The portrait has also inspired conspiracy theories. In Ben Jonson’s short introductory poem to the First Folio, his play on words regarding the engraving has been seized upon by Shakespeare deniers as some sort of secret code “proving” that Shakespeare did not write the plays:
To the Reader
This Figure, that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut,
Whereine the Graver had a strife
With Nature, to out-doo the life:
O, could he but have drawne his wit
As well in brasse, as he hath hit
His face, the Print would then surpasse
All, that was ever writ in brasse.
But, since he cannot, Reader, looke
Not on his Picture, but his Booke.
Conspiracy theorists translate Jonson as saying: if you wish to find the man who wrote the words, look in the book, and not on his face, because the man whose face you see is not the author. What Jonson really meant was that no static likeness could ever convey the zest and wit of the living Shakespeare that he and the King’s Men knew and heard. Rather, to know the true man, Jonson says, read his words, and perform them. And yet Heminges and Condell thought it important for the reader to gaze upon that face.9
After the printed text, title page, and preliminaries were printed and dried, Jaggard’s men gathered and stitched them together. While pages within the quire were sequenced with the help of catchwords, gatherings were put in correct order using a unique signature in the lower margin of the first leaf of the quire. It might seem logical to use the page numbers as a guide to collating the pages, but pagination was notoriously flawed in books of such length—and the First Folio is no exception—because the casting-off process was imperfect. Thus, the First Folio pagination is incomplete, containing unnumbered pages and repeated numbers.
To Heminges and Condell, the preliminaries were as important as the main text. They intende
d these pages not only to speak to an audience of the 1620s, but also to reach across time to all of Shakespeare’s future readers. They wanted us to know their friend, not just his words. The first page of the preliminaries contains Jonson’s “To the Reader.”
The title page, which faces Jonson’s verse, displays the complete title Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, published according to the True Originall copies, cites the place of publication as London, and announces that the book was printed in 1623 “by Isaac Jaggard and Ed. Blount”—a slight misstatement as the Jaggard shop did all the printing. Isaac’s name had replaced his father’s as William had died a short time before publication.
The third preliminary, the dedication epistle, was written by Heminges and Condell “To the Most Noble & Incomparable Paire of Brethren” William Earl of Pembroke, who served as “Lord Chamberlaine to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty,” and Philip Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, from whom the editors sought patronage: “We have but collected them, and done an office to the dead, to procure his Orphanes, Guardians; without ambition either of selfe-profit, or fame: onely to keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend, & Fellow alive, as was our S H A K E S P E A R E . . . therefore, we most humbly consecrate to [you] these remaines of your servant Shakespeare.” They ask that the two nobles “shew their gratitude both to the living, and the dead.”
Next, Heminges and Condell appealed to the public—“The great Variety of Readers,” from educated men to those who could barely read, “From the most able, to him that can but spell”—to “read, and censure . . . but buy it first.” They beseech the public to read, and even criticize the plays, pleading, “But, whatever you do, Buy.”
The editors expressed regret that “the author himselfe” did not live to oversee the publication of his plays. And so they published them on his behalf, not from “diverse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors” but “cur’d, and perfect of their limbes, and all the rest, absolute in their numbers as he conceived them.” Heminges and Condell evoked the apparent ease and speed with which Shakespeare composed his texts: “His mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarse received from him a blot in his papers.” In other words, his hand moved so quickly across the page that his quill did not rest long enough to leave a blot of ink behind. But it is not up to us, say Heminges and Condell, to praise Shakespeare. It is up to you to find in the text “enough, both to draw, and hold you: for his wit can no more lie hid, than it could be lost. Reade him, therefore; and againe, and againe.”
The next preliminary, “To the Memory of My Beloved, Mr. William Shakespeare and what he hath left us,” is a most romantic and complimentary eulogy. Here Jonson, as famous as Shakespeare was during their lifetimes, pays a stunning homage. First, he elevates him to the pantheon of English literature, comparing him to the gods Chaucer, Spenser, and Beaumont. Then Jonson ranks Shakespeare above all his contemporaries, including John Lyly, Thomas Kyd, and Christopher Marlowe, singling him out as the “Soule of the Age!”
While I confesse thy writings to be such,
As neither Man, nor Muse, can praise too much.
. . . Soule of the Age!
The applause! delight! the wonder of our Stage!
My Shakespeare, rise; I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lye
A little further, to make thee a roome:
Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe,
And art alive still, while thy Booke doth live . . .
And tell, how farre thou dist our Lily out-shine,
Or sporting Kid or Marlowes mighty line.
And though thou hadst small Latine, and lesse Greeke, . . .
He was not of an age, but for all time!
Not all contributors to the preliminaries possessed Jonson’s eloquence. Hugh Holland’s elegiac sonnet, “Upon the Lines and Life of the famous Scenicke Poet, Master William Shakespeare,” was not very good, but contains a few couplets worth remembering.
Those hands, which you so clapt, go now, and wring
You Britaines brave; for done are Shakespeares dayes:
His dayes are done, that made the dainty Playes, . . .
For though his line of life went soone about,
The life yet of his lines shall never out.
Next in order came “A CATALOGVE of the Seuerall Comedies, Historie, and Tragedies in this Volume”—what modern readers would call the table of contents—listing the plays. The classifications mimicked the practice at the Globe Theatre of using a colored flag on the roof to communicate what genre of play was being performed that day: red flag for history, white for comedy, and black for tragedy.
The next preliminary, Leonard Digges’s “To the Memorie of the deceased Authour Maister W. Shake-speare,” was, like Hugh Holland’s verse, no masterpiece. Still, it contained a heartfelt sentiment.
This Booke,
When Brasse and Marble fade, shall make thee looke
Fresh to all Ages: . . .
Be sure, our Shake-speare, thou canst never dye,
But crown’d with Lawrell, live eternally.
Printed on the same page as the Digges verse is James Mabbe’s forgettable “To the Memorie of M.W. Shake-speare,” which imagines the playwright in the dressing room of the great Globe Theatre in the sky. “Wee thought thee dead,” Mabbe laments, but Shakespeare lives on in the First Folio, “this thy printed worth.”
WEE wondred, Shake-speare, that thou went’st so soone
From the Worlds-Stage, to the Graves-Tyring-roome.
Last, Heminges and Condell listed “The Names of the Principall Actors in all these Playes.” They wanted to record for all time the names of the men who had first breathed life into Shakespeare’s characters. The twenty-six actors included William Shakespeare, John Heminges, Henry Condell, Richard Burbage, Will Kemp, Samuel Gilburne, and the rest, many of whom would have been lost to history but for this list.
The First Folio was not the most important project on which Jaggard’s men labored from February 1622 to December 1623; and they were in no particular hurry to finish it. A book by Jaggard’s friend Augustine Vincent was rushed into print ahead of both Shakespeare’s First Folio and André Favyn’s Theatre of Honour and Knight-Hood.10 Jaggard periodically stopped printing books whenever he could make money on other, smaller jobs—proclamations, broadsides, copies of the Ten Commandments, and playbills. He had no idea that he was delaying a historic undertaking. But then, neither did anyone else.
The Vincent book was also folio size and shared with Shakespeare’s volume a variety of printers’ ornaments, the decorative woodcuts easily recognizable in previous and subsequent works printed by Jaggard and his son. Publication of Vincent’s Discoverie of Errours in the First Edition of the Catalogue of Nobility, Published by Raphe Brooke, Yorke Herald, 1619 was accelerated ahead of the First Folio to beat to publication a book that would contain accusations concerning Jaggard’s professional competence. The author of that book, Raphe Brooke, blamed Jaggard for the large number of errors that had appeared in a book that Jaggard had printed for him. Augustine Vincent defended Jaggard in Discoverie of Errours, and time was of the essence in getting that volume to market.
The Shakespeare folio was announced to the trade in advance of its publication. The Frankfurt Book Fair was the publishing industry’s largest event of the year, and in 1622, John Bill, printer to the King of England, issued an English translation of the Frankfurt catalogue as well as a list of books printed in English. It contained this modest announcement: “Playes, written by M. William Shakespeare, all in one volume, printed by Isaack Iaggard, in fol.” Also listed for publication that year was Augustine Vincent’s Discoverie of Errours.
From the summer of 1622 through the fall of 1623, the printing continued; the same set of motions, repeated hundreds of times in setting the type, and tens of thousands of time
s inking the type, laying down the sheet, and pulling the lever. Month by month, the stacks of printed pages grew taller. No single book could be stitched and bound until all the pages had been printed.
When at last the printing was finished, the First Folio was a physically impressive object sitting in Blount’s bookshop, at the sign of the Black Bear in St. Paul’s Churchyard. At more than nine hundred pages, it was a solid book with size and heft. The tallest copies, right off the press, untrimmed by the binder’s plow, measured 131/2 by 83/4 inches. The project was finished. It had taken two years to print the massive First Folio. At last it could be made available for sale. Publishing it had been an unprecedented, ambitious, complicated, and risky project. The public was not lining up outside Blount’s shop to buy copies.
The book was sold as is, in unbound leaves “in sheets,” or in one of three bindings available from Jaggard. Forel, the least expensive, was a limp, creamy white parchment. Untanned calf or goatskin, with one side smooth and the other rough, was more expensive. Tanned calfskin, at one pound, was the most costly standard binding, and was light brown to mahogany in color. Some buyers purchased the text in sheets and paid their favorite bookbinders to clothe the First Folio in exquisite calfskin with elaborate decoration. Sometimes, the owner had the edges of the paper trimmed to eliminate the rough, deckled edge. He might have the resulting smooth edges gilt with a thin layer of gold using an adhesive of egg white and water. Such a treatment was expensive, but would serve a greater purpose than the owner’s vanity; gilt edges would also provide a barrier against dust and moisture, protecting the book from the elements and preserving it. If the buyer could not afford to gild every edge, he might treat only the top one, where the most dust would settle. Further adornment could be achieved by gauffering the edges of a gilt or silvered book, pressing heated decorative tools into the edges.