by Andrea Mays
Some bibliophiles have romanticized the First Folio as a magnificent example of the printer’s art. To Heminges and Condell, its physical appearance was never of much importance. What was vital to them was the content: its significance was, is, in saving the oeuvre of Shakespeare, rather than in its aesthetic merits. Imagine an accurate catalogue description that could have been printed at the time:
Each copy unique, some copies missing one play, pages misnumbered, different copies containing the portrait of the author in varying states, some copies with one page of crossed-out text, table of contents not necessarily accurate. May include uncorrected proof pages within the text. Prose occasionally printed as verse, and vice versa. Stage directions missing in some parts. Spelling and punctuation haphazard, though less in some copies than in others, printers’ ornaments worn and broken, inconsistent page numbering. Prologue to Romeo and Juliet missing in some copies. Sold in a variety of bindings or in sheets, ready to take to your favorite binder to indulge your preferences at your expense.
On November 8, 1623, the publishers entered in the Register at the Stationers’ Company “Master William Shakespears Comedyes, Histories, and Tragedies so many of the said Copies as are not formerly entered to other men.”11 By the mid-sixteenth century, members of any theatrical company had to present to the warden any proposed publication not protected by royal grant. This list, the “register of Copies,” in which Jaggard and Blount entered the First Folio, was the official record of their exclusive right to print the complete works of William Shakespeare. The entry in the Register was intended to protect not the author, but the printer—only a member of the Worshipful Company of Stationers of London could enter a book. Jaggard and Blount now “owned” the publishing rights, and they could exploit them, neither compensating the author nor requiring his permission. No work previously registered by a member of the Company could be printed by another member, and disputes as to ownership were settled through the Company. Printers who were not also booksellers usually had to arrange with one or more booksellers to market their books; William Aspley, member of the syndicate that published the First Folio, owned the Parrot, a few feet west of Blount’s shop at the sign of the Black Bear.
Flawed though the First Folio was as an example of the printer’s art, without it we would not possess definitive texts closest to Shakespeare’s original intentions for the plays that would, absent the First Folio, have come down to us only in some lesser form via various quartos. And without the First Folio, we would have lost the text of half the plays that were never printed during Shakespeare’s life, and perhaps even the knowledge that some of those plays had ever existed: The Tempest, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Measure for Measure, The Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, All’s Well That Ends Well, Twelfth Night, King John, Henry VI Part 1, Henry VIII, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Winter’s Tale.
Were Heminges and Condell’s choices perfect? No. Does the First Folio reflect the text of each play exactly as written by Shakespeare? Almost certainly not. But it is the best we have. And scholars have spilled much ink disagreeing on what the “true” text is. The casual reader might be astonished to know that there isn’t one true text. If Shakespeare could return to us and read the First Folio from cover to cover, and we asked him, “Is it word for word exactly as you wrote it?” he might well answer, “No, but close enough.”
Postmodern scholars (dubious of the sole-author-as-genius creative model) dispute whether the texts of Shakespeare’s plays were ever truly fixed. On the contrary, they argue, the texts were always changing, even during Shakespeare’s lifetime, in constant flux due to alterations by the author, the players, and even the publishers of the quartos. Thus Shakespeare was not the “sole” author and the play texts were never permanent but constantly evolving.
Others think the canon of Shakespeare was always settled, but that is not so. What we accept as the canon today is a result of choices made by Heminges and Condell as well as the vicissitudes of chance, according to the sources available to them. The First Folio did not include all the plays: some, like Pericles, were known but not included. Some, like Love’s Labour’s Wonne, were known but already “lost” or surviving under another name. Heminges and Condell were unable to secure the rights to publish Pericles. Love’s Labour’s Wonne, attributed to Shakespeare, appeared in a bookseller’s record in 1603, but no copy has ever been found. It is possible that the title was changed to Love’s Labour’s Lost. Scholars have speculated that Heminges and Condell excluded plays that were not entirely Shakespeare’s own work, like The Two Noble Kinsmen, but such a strict standard would also have resulted in the exclusion of Henry VIII, on which Shakespeare had also collaborated with Fletcher, which is included in the First Folio.12
Little is known about the first buyers, though the first recorded retail sale appears as an entry on December 5, 1623, in the account book of Sir Edward Dering. It shows that he attended a play, which cost one shilling, six denarii, and he purchased “two volumes of Shakespear’s playes” for two pounds. He also purchased “Jhonson’s playes” for nine shillings. We also know what happened to two more of the earliest copies to leave the shop. Jaggard sent one free copy, unbound in sheets, to the Bodleian Library at Oxford, as required by an agreement between the library and the Stationers’ Company. The other was the first presentation copy of the Shakespeare First Folio, whose story begins with Raphe Brooke.
Raphe Brooke, a member of the College of Arms (or Herald’s College), objected to the coat of arms given to the Shakespeares. Three centuries later, Henry Folger would describe him thus: “Brooke, a man without a past, had forced his way into the sacred precincts. His very name and lineage were assumed.” When the esteemed heraldic scholar William Camden supported the legitimacy of the Shakespeare grant, Brooke published in 1596 a defamatory book that attacked Camden’s book Britannia, a distinguished genealogical volume. Then, in 1619, Brooke published, through the printer William Jaggard, his own book on peerage, riddled with errors and containing further defamations against Camden. Outraged, the Windsor Herald of Arms, the state official charged with control over issuance of arms and maintenance of heraldic records, Augustine Vincent, rose in defense of Camden and exposed Brooke’s ridiculous mistakes.13 Brooke responded by issuing a second edition of his book, blaming whatever errors it contained on his “rascally printer” by whom many “divers faults and many mistakings were committed.” Now Brooke had defamed not only Camden but also William Jaggard, future printer of the First Folio.
In 1622, Augustine Vincent escalated the feud by publishing a rejoinder, A Discoverie of Errours in the Catalogue of Nobility, Published by Raphe Brooke.14 Vincent chose as his publisher none other than Jaggard, who was eager to repay Brooke’s offense. Jaggard included in Vincent’s book several pages of his own accusing Brooke of “falsifications, suborning of incestuous matches, bastard issues, and changing children in the cradle, and such scumms of his ranke eloquence.” A Discoverie of Errours pronounced Brooke guilty of all manner of offenses, including “Your owne intolerable arrogance and pride of conceite, your vilifying and contempt of others, as if you had stoode on the toppe of Powles, and saw all men under you no bigger than Jacke-dawes; your familiar vaine of detracting from the best and Worthiest men; your tongue gliding over no man’s name, but that it left a slime behind it.” Brooke, finally, was finished.
In 1623, Jaggard printed the First Folio and, in gratitude for the punishment Vincent had meted out to Brooke, presented him, the Windsor Herald, with one of the earliest copies to be bound. The impression of the engraved portrait of Shakespeare on the title page of this copy is so fresh and brilliant that it must have been one of the first copies struck from the copper plate. The volume was bound in calfskin, and the front cover was embossed with Vincent’s coat of arms—“a bear, holding in his left paw a banner, and in his right a squire’s helmet, surrounded with a crest of a bear’s head, st
anding on a scroll with the motto ‘Vincenti Augusta’ (Laurels for a conqueror).” The motto was meant to be a pun on Vincent’s own name. William Jaggard could not inscribe the book to his friend, because the blind printer had died before the First Folio job was completed. So Augustine Vincent inscribed the title page in his own hand: “Ex donno Willi Jaggard. Typographi a 1623,” identifying the book as a gift from the printer. Then the book vanished for the next 278 years.
The publication of the First Folio, despite Ben Jonson’s stirring proclamation that its author was the “Soule of the Age!” who merited eternal fame because he was “Not of an age, but for all time,” did not set the world aflame. It took nine years to sell out the first printing. But it made possible what was to come, a story that would take another century and a half to unfold.
The First Folio saved all of Shakespeare’s plays from textual corruption, and half of them from oblivion, but it also left a great mystery that remains unsolved to this day. What did Heminges and Condell do with all the source materials they collected, which they distilled into the final text of the First Folio? It is not likely that they turned everything they found over to their printer. Jaggard played no role in editing these sources down to a final draft. He needed no more than a legible copy of each play for his compositors to set the type. Once Heminges and Condell generated those fair copies, what happened to the sources that they gathered to create them? Did they destroy them, or preserve them in some safe place? And what did Jaggard do with the pages his compositors used to set the type? Did he return them to Heminges and Condell, or did he destroy them seriatim as each printed quire transferred text from manuscript to type? Or did he sell the paper for scrap? Was it consigned to the fire? And what of the preliminaries—the manuscript tributes by Jonson and the others, and the message to the reader from Heminges and Condell? All gone. Not one page from the archives of Shakespeare’s editors has survived.
Of course it is possible that somewhere in England, in a private library at a remote country house, set high upon a dusty shelf, there lies an old, forgotten leather portfolio, stuffed with hundreds of manuscript pages and quartos, hand-marked with heavy strikeouts and emendations—the long-lost Heminges and Condell hoard. Or perhaps in the attic of that house, there rests a small, locked trunk that once belonged to the loyal friends who wore Shakespeare’s rings. There is precedent for such astonishing discoveries; that is how the famous sixteenth-century Waldseemüller map was discovered. It was the first map that ever printed the name “America.” Long known to scholars, no copy had ever been found. Its huge size and fragile nature argued against its survival. Then, several years ago, the only known copy in the world turned up in a private German library and was sold to the Library of Congress for ten million dollars. The discovery of the archives of Heminges and Condell would answer one of the most puzzling literary mysteries of all time: How did they create the First Folio?
Chapter 4
“My Shakespeare, Rise”
—BEN JONSON
THE PUBLICATION in 1623 of the First Folio did not immediately lead to Shakespeare’s apotheosis. The folio was a necessary precondition for Shakespeare’s rebirth, but it took another 140 years, and three distinct stages of evolution, for the playwright, and his book, to achieve immortality. Over the next century and a half, a colorful cast of proclaimers, editors, bowdlerizers, biographers, literary critics, actors, and collectors—curators of his reputation—elevated him to the pantheon of the greatest writers in the English language.
During the first phase, between 1623 and 1709, a consensus formed in England that Shakespeare was one of the preeminent writers of the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages. His plays were no longer considered second-class stepchildren to his high art, poetry. But sales of the First Folio suggest that this recognition took time. A book printed in such a limited quantity could never enjoy widespread distribution in a nation of several million people.
By 1632, Jaggard and Blount had exhausted their stocks of First Folios. A second edition of the book was published that year. Heminges and Condell were no longer alive to supervise the reprinting, which was executed not by Jaggard but by the firm of Smethwick and Aspley, et al. This edition, called the Second Folio, corrected some errors in the First but it introduced others. Essentially a reprint of the First Folio, it is most famous for its inclusion of John Milton’s verse, “An Epitaph of the admirable Dramaticke Poet, W. Shakespeare,” the first time a poem of Milton’s appeared in print.
Shakespeare’s collected plays would not be printed again for another thirty-one years. The cause of the delay was not literary but historical. The London plague of 1636 paralyzed the theatrical world for a time. More ominously, the English Civil War of 1642–1651 enforced radical changes in popular culture, including the banning of performances of plays. The beheading of King Charles I (who had kept a copy of the Second Folio close during his captivity) on January 30, 1649, signaled dark days for the English theater during the era of Puritan dominance. Only the death of Oliver Cromwell in 1658 and the restoration of the monarchy, which brought Charles II to the throne in May 1660 and saw him crowned on Shakespeare’s birthday, April 23, 1661, revived the theater. The contemporary diary of Samuel Pepys offers wonderful evidence of how plays, including ribald versions of old favorites, flourished under the new king, a man sympathetic to the arts as a cultural force.
The good news for Shakespeare’s reputation was that in Restoration England, almost fifty years after his death, some of his plays were being staged again. The bad news was that some of them were barely recognizable as the plays he wrote and that we know today. Characters were subtracted (the fool vanished from Lear) and tragic endings were lightened up (Romeo and Juliet ended with a happy marriage). One theater treated audiences to alternating tragic and romantic endings every other night. In 1667 William Davenant (D’Avenant), Poet Laureate of England, collaborated with John Dryden to adapt The Tempest.1
A Third Folio of the plays appeared in 1663, forty years after publication of the First. Shakespeare was still popular enough to justify a new printing of his works. The big selling point of the third edition was that it contained seven new plays hitherto unattributed to him: The London Prodigal; The Life and Death of Thomas, Lord Cromwell; The History of Sir John Oldcastle, the Good Lord Cobham; The Puritan, or the Widow of Watling Street; A Yorkshire Tragedy; The Tragedy of Locrine; and Pericles. Unfortunately, of the seven additional plays, six were spurious. Scholars believe that only one of them, Pericles, was actually, at least partially, written by Shakespeare at all.
Because the Third Folio purported to include additional material, it superseded the importance of the First in the mind of the public, and thus supplanted it in many libraries. It is impossible to know how many owners of the First Folio disposed of their old copies once they obtained the new Third Folio, but in one instance that became notorious centuries later, the Bodleian Library sold the First Folio as surplus and shelved the Third Folio in its place. The library’s records suggest that it went to Richard Davis, an Oxford bookseller, for twenty-four pounds. It was a trivial, improvident act that would set in motion unanticipated reverberations 250 years later. No one realized at the time that the text of the First Folio was superior to that of the Second or Third, or that the number of perfect copies of the First Folio was dwindling year by year.2
The Third Folio, although not the most desirable or most valuable of the seventeenth-century Shakespeare Folios, is the rarest, not because of sustained losses over the vicissitudes of time but due to a mass disaster—many copies were destroyed during the 1666 Great Fire of London. Because this folio had been published just three years prior, a large unsold stock was still on hand at the booksellers around St. Paul’s. No doubt the Great Fire also counted among its victims a number of First Folios. But these were not lost en masse; the stockpile of First Folios had sold out decades earlier, and the 750 copies had been dispersed—safely, it turned out—throughout London, England, and even Europe. As it had be
en during Shakespeare’s lifetime, London in 1666 was still medieval in its street plan, an overcrowded warren of half a million inhabitants, living in narrow, winding, cobbled alleys, slippery with dung and urine, both animal and human. The houses were primarily wooden, many with thatched straw roofs and wood chimneys. The more expensive and more fireproof stone houses were located in the center of town. Spark-belching workshops, including blacksmiths, bakers, and glaziers, had cropped up within the crowded city despite having long been forbidden, as a precaution against fire, from doing so. One such bakery, Farriner’s on Pudding Lane, would soon become notorious. Many buildings were top-heavy, constructed with their upper floors larger than their ground floors, so that protruding “jetties” almost touched neighboring structures. Like tree limbs, these timber-framed Tudor structures grew and curved above the narrow streets below until the upper stories of these homes and shops practically touched, “like old crones whispering secrets to each other.”3 The result? London was one giant firetrap.