by Andrea Mays
On the evening of Sunday, September 2, 1666, fire broke out in Farriner’s and spread quickly. Many people, before fleeing the city, buried their valuables to protect them from flames and looters. Some Londoners believed that St. Paul’s, with its mighty stone walls, ingenious lead-covered roof, and wide plaza surrounding the church, offered obvious sanctuary from the firestorm. And royal decrees had long required that churches keep firefighting supplies available—leather buckets, ladders, barrels of water. But in the years since London’s previous great fire, much of that equipment had disappeared, been stolen, or been left in disrepair. A recent drought had all but dried up the water stored in the cisterns, and there was insufficient manpower or equipment to fight the blaze by hand.
Printers and booksellers from adjoining Paternoster Row rushed to St. Paul’s with carts crammed full of their goods—printed unbound sheets, books sewn and ready for binding, and bound books—and carried them into the underground, airtight crypt of St. Faith’s Chapel in St. Paul’s. Fire requires three factors in order to combust: a source of fuel, a source of ignition, and oxygen. The combustible goods stowed in the airtight crypt were, it was presumed, protected from the onrushing fire by the lack of oxygen in the underground chamber and the stone construction of the building. But although the huge, six-acre wooden roof had been protected with a fire-resistant sheet of lead, the edges of the roof had not been so covered. The flames took hold at these narrow but vulnerable wooden edges. The vaulting underneath was all timber—dried out from weeks of scorching sun without rain—an ideal fuel to feed the fire. As flames consumed the underlying roof, the superheated lead began to melt. The roof collapsed, and tons of timber and stonework crashed down to the slate floor below.
The roar of the falling roof could be heard all over London, above the cacophony of the fire, the screams of fleeing inhabitants, and even the gunpowder explosions announcing the intentional demolition of houses to deny fuel to the fire. The stone of the outer skin of St. Paul’s heated and exploded
like Granados . . . the melting lead running down the streets in a stream and the very pavements glowing with fiery redness, so as no horse, nor man, was able to tread on them, and the demolition had stopped all the passages, so that no help could be applied. The eastern wind still more impetuously driving the flames forward. Nothing but the Almighty power of God was able to stop them for vain was the help of man.4
Inside St. Paul’s, the collapsing roof broke the slate floor and cracked the ceiling of the crypt. Oxygen seeped into the chamber and molten lead dripped onto the contents. The books and papers were destroyed. Samuel Pepys described the loss: “The cathedral was quickly a ruin,” but books and paper stored in the crypt burned for two weeks. “I hear the great loss of books in St. Paul’s Church-yarde, and at their Hall also, which they value about £150,000; some booksellers being wholly undone . . . they trusting St. Fayth’s and the roof of the church falling, broke the arch down into the lower church and so all the goods burned. A Very great loss.”5
The Fourth Folio was published in 1685. It included the seven new plays—six of them apocryphal—introduced by the Third Folio, and perpetuated errors from both the Second and Third Folios. But the era of Shakespeare folios was coming to an end, in more ways than one. There would be no Fifth Folio. No later printings of the plays would resemble the physical appearance of the first or the three that followed. To an untrained eye, a later folio might look very much like a First—they shared the same large-size format, were printed in double columns, and included the engraved portrait by Droeshout, although the once-fine details captured by its copper printing plate were now worn away from decades of use. So, too, did the language preserved by the First Folio degrade over time. The subsequent folios had strayed from the urtext blessed by Heminges and Condell.
No one had yet realized the unique literary value of the First Folio. By the end of the seventeenth century, book dealers began to list in their sales catalogues used, out-of-print copies of the 1623 edition, but without any indication that the volume was held in high esteem.6 Still, Shakespeare’s reputation was slowly on the rise. As early as 1668, in An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, John Dryden gushed, “I admire [Ben Jonson], but I love Shakespeare.”7 But what Heminges and Condell hoped to achieve by their careful editing and arranging of the plays was being undermined by the success of the later folios. By 1685, it was by no means certain that Shakespeare’s original language would survive as they had preserved it. This was a double cruelty. First, Heminges and Condell had died too soon for them to know the importance of what they had accomplished. And now, what they had accomplished was in jeopardy. By 1700, seventy-seven years after they completed the First Folio, there was no guarantee that the new century would belong to “their” Shakespeare.
In 1709, the age of Heminges and Condell and the four folios had passed. Now began the second stage in the evolution of Shakespeare’s reputation and the preservation of his texts, the era of “the editors” and literary criticism. In that year Nicholas Rowe published his edition of the plays in an entirely new format, a multivolume octavo size, based on the Fourth Folio text. Rowe became the first “real” editor of Shakespeare since Heminges and Condell. In his quest to retrieve the true text, Rowe relied on a 1685 Fourth Folio. He was the first to add a list of dramatis personae, to insert act and scene divisions, and to insert stage directions for actors’ entrances and exits. In his dedication he claimed:
I have taken some Care to redeem [Shakespeare] from the Injuries of former Impressions. I must not pretend to have restor’d this Work to the Exactness of the Author’s Original Manuscripts: These are lost, or, at least, are gone beyond any Inquiry I could make so that there was nothing left, but to compare the several Editions, and give the true Readings as well as I could from thence.
Notwithstanding Rowe’s boast to protect Shakespeare from “injuries,” the editor included in his new edition the apocryphal plays from the Third and Fourth Folios.
Rowe also wrote a biography of Shakespeare, the first one attempted in the more than ninety years since the playwright’s death. But it was too late. By then, everyone who had known the poet was dead. Anne Hathaway had died in August 1623. Shakespeare’s last surviving child, Judith, had died in 1662. No one alive could provide the raw facts of his life or vivid recollections of events. If only Heminges and Condell had thought to include in the First Folio a short biography, even one of just thirty or forty pages, their anecdotes might have answered many of the questions that have gnawed at generations of Shakespeare scholars.
Rowe inspired other editors to try their hand at taming and packaging Shakespeare. The appearance over a short period of multiple, posthumous editions of the same work is a sign that an author’s reputation is on the rise.
In 1725, Alexander Pope issued his six-volume quarto edition based largely on Rowe’s work. Pope also claimed to have used as sources the First and Second Folios, as well as twenty-seven quartos of various dates. He inserted into the plays passages that he believed should have been present from the beginning, but that were “missing” from the folios. In 1733, Lewis Theobald, a critic of Pope’s edition who is credited by some as “the first Shakespearean scholar,” collated the quarto printings of the plays, investigated Shakespeare’s literary sources, and published his edition in octavo.8 Other editions followed, from Thomas Hanmer in 1744 and from William Warburton in 1747.
In another measure of Shakespeare’s growing importance, his Holy Trinity Church monument was restored in 1748–49, the historic preservation funded with the first known performance of a Shakespeare play in Stratford. Town records do not indicate which play it was. In the progression of Shakespeare’s apotheosis, the first academic lectures on his work at an English university occurred at Oxford in 1751.9 In 1765, the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson published his Plays of William Shakespeare, in eight octavo volumes, with a magnificent preface praising Shakespeare’s drama as the “mirrour of life.” And in 1768, Edward Capell published in
ten volumes his thirty years’ worth of quarto collation and other research into Shakespeare’s sources.
By the 1750s, more than 125 years after its publication, English editors and bibliophiles had finally recognized the First Folio for what it had always been: a rare and desirable book of the utmost literary and historical importance. It also attained status as a cultural icon. In eighteenth-century England, the conspicuous display of antiquarian objects or texts indicated a fashionable reverence for the past. Prior to the mid-eighteenth century, the later editions—the Second, Third, and Fourth Folios—superseded the First in the minds of readers, who failed to realize that, rather than containing improvements, each subsequent edition strayed further and further from Shakespeare’s original language. Then, when the new Rowe edition of 1709 was published, it supplanted all of the preceding folios. By then, many copies of the First Folio had already been lost, sold off as superfluous, discarded, or broken up. Only later did scholars realize that it was irreplaceable, and superior to all subsequent editions. But by then, two-thirds of them had vanished, and over the next century and a half, many more were cannibalized to repair incomplete copies.
By the 1750s, Shakespeare’s reputation as a great author was secure in the British literary world. In 1769, a peculiar event made him a national icon in British popular culture. In that pivotal year, the famed actor David Garrick staged the world’s first Shakespeare festival. Garrick, a close friend of Shakespeare biographer Samuel Johnson, made his first appearance on a London stage in 1741, and later that year he played the character for which he became renowned: Richard III. Garrick owned that role for the next two generations, and he also gave beloved performances of other tragic and comic characters. His associations with royalty raised the status of actors in general. Like Shakespeare, Garrick was actor, playwright, and businessman. Garrick, the Richard Burbage of his age, was England’s first modern stage star.
Born in 1717, Garrick was credited with rescuing Shakespeare’s plays “from the rust of antiquity by his excellence of acting.”10 Slight of build and short of stature, he created and then popularized a more natural style of delivering Shakespeare’s lines, shunning the declamatory speech and bombastic style popular at the time. Alexander Pope, an enthusiastic Garrick fan, insisted, “He will never have a rival.” By 1769, after enjoying more than a quarter century of fame, David Garrick honored the man whose plays had catapulted him to stardom and whom he praised as “the God of our Idolatry.” He concocted what he hoped would be an incomparable festival, a grand Shakespeare Jubilee, and he planned to stage it not in cosmopolitan London but in Stratford-upon-Avon, the playwright’s sleepy hometown.
Garrick overwhelmed the bewildered Stratfordians with his proposal. In exchange for his pledge to fund a renovation of the town hall, city officials gave him free rein to organize a three-day Shakespeare festival in September. Stratford was not a destination for literary tourists on a quest for the wellspring of Shakespeare’s greatness. So Garrick decided to build a shrine to Shakespeare there, a replica of the elaborate, classical rotunda he had already built at his own home. It was a sublime example of English folly architecture.
Garrick, a master at public relations, lover of his own fame, and loudly proclaimed lover of Shakespeare, had ambitious plans. The Jubilee’s main attraction would be an unprecedented literary pageant, a parade through the town by actors costumed as the most memorable characters from Shakespeare’s plays. The three-day-long party would be filled with feasting, pageantry, processions, fireworks, and balls. The Jubilee was concocted to appeal to the masses, not scholars and intellectuals. Strangely, at the world’s first Shakespeare publicity event, not a single play was to be performed, and not one poem written by Shakespeare was to be recited.
Some scholars made fun of the whole enterprise, satirizing it in print before it even happened. Others, including Garrick’s friend Samuel Johnson, declined to attend. Still, Garrick had created massive advance publicity for the Jubilee and all signs pointed to its success. Garrick appointed his literary agent as the head of merchandising. In a surprising twist, the merchandise being sold was only tangentially related to Shakespeare. It was mostly Garrickiana—Garrick plays, songbooks, broadsides, engravings, and more. Indeed, from the catalogue of goods and paraphernalia sold there, one might wonder whom this festival was really intended to celebrate.
It was a fiasco. Rains swelled the nearby river Avon and flooded the shrine under half a foot of water. The fireworks display—the promised exciting finale—was rained out. Mud paralyzed traffic on Stratford’s unpaved streets, and on the third day Garrick canceled the remaining festivities, including a pageant of characters from Shakespeare’s plays. The high point of the Jubilee was Garrick’s performance of what came to be known later as “the Ode”—an Ode upon Dedicating a Building, and Erecting a Statue, to Shakespeare, at Stratford upon Avon. Garrick spoke the piece—more like an opera recitative than delivery of a poem—over musical accompaniment.11 The Shakespeare Jubilee was a financial failure. Garrick had to reimburse the town of Stratford for two thousand pounds in expenses. Despite the mocking news reports that followed, the actor was able to salvage something from his considerable efforts. He moved the pageant and the Ode to Drury Lane in London. There he presented it as a standalone entertainment called The Jubilee, which ran for ninety-one nights in 1769 and 1770. The scheme worked, despite biting criticism in the press and the simultaneous London theater production of a satire making fun of Garrick’s colossal ego and the festival’s failure. The Ode became an old chestnut in Garrick’s repertoire, and he performed it again in 1776.
With the Jubilee of 1769, David Garrick had created a Shakespeare industry and buttressed the author’s transformation from mortal man to English god. Although George Bernard Shaw did not coin the term bardolatry until the very early twentieth century, it offers a perfect description of Garrick’s enterprise, as it was the first ultra-manifestation of the cult of Shakespeare. Garrick, master image-maker, impresario, and publicity hound, had single-handedly created an entire industry around the worship, commemoration, performance, and marketing of all things Shakespeare. Indeed, Garrick’s intuitive grasp of the importance of marketing and merchandising in the entertainment business was prophetic.
Stratford took notice. After the participants in the failed Jubilee departed and the deluged town dried out, local boosters hit upon a brilliant idea. The Jubilee had been planned as a onetime event. Recognizing a good opportunity when they saw it, the corporation of Stratford capitalized on Garrick’s idea by honoring their most famous son not once but yearly ever after. Over time, Stratford’s annual Shakespeare’s birthday festivities evolved into a year-round celebration luring tourists to his birthplace. The Bard’s former homes became shrines, and wooden souvenirs—goblets, boxes, and small chests—carved from a mulberry tree allegedly planted by Shakespeare, like fragments of Christ’s true cross coveted by religious pilgrims, fetched handsome sums.
Bardolatry spread to continental Europe. In October 1772, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe delivered a speech in Frankfurt in honor of the first German “Shakespeare Day.” The author of the incomparable Faust and The Sorrows of Young Werther described his personal awakening to literature as coincident with his discovery of Shakespeare.12
In 1789, in another extravagant sign of apotheosis, an English Shakespeare fanatic named John Boydell opened an art gallery devoted exclusively to displaying a collection of specially commissioned oil paintings depicting famous characters and scenes from the plays. Such a scheme might sound static and dull to a modern reader in the age of photography, motion pictures, animation, and the Internet, when a variety of images can be summoned up anywhere in the world with the tap of a finger, but in the eighteenth century, painting was the only art, aside from a live performance itself, that could offer a full-color visual depiction of scenes from the plays.
An engraver, successful entrepreneur, and onetime Lord Mayor of the City of London, Boydell had been searching for an
artistic business project that could “wipe away the stigma that all foreign critics threw” on British art, particularly French skeptics who defamed English historical painting as inferior.13 Boydell sought a suitable subject for the soon-to-be-commissioned English paintings, settling on the one “National” subject that he believed everyone could agree on: Shakespeare.
Boydell’s business plan was to commission paintings, and from them have the leading engravers of the time make copies in various sizes and prices, affordable to less affluent Londoners. The prints were also to be included as artworks in a new literary endeavor—an eight-volume, quarto-sized, illustrated collected works of Shakespeare, edited by George Stevens, a noted eighteenth-century Shakespeare scholar. The prints could also be purchased separately as a folio of engravings. The original paintings would hang in the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery as a celebration of British nationalism and greatness. At least that was the plan.
Boydell commissioned some of the biggest names in British art, including Joshua Reynolds, George Romney, and Swiss émigré Henry Fuseli (né Johann Heinrich Füssli), to create the first visual images of scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. On May 4, 1789, the Shakespeare Gallery opened at Fifty-Two Pall Mall, London, to positive reviews. It was a year in which British pride needed some bolstering: in April, George Washington had been inaugurated as the first president of the Empire’s lost jewel, the former American colonies. On opening day, the gallery exhibited thirty-four paintings by eighteen artists. Boydell’s hope to sell large quantities of prints foundered from production delays, impatient customers, disputes with temperamental engravers, and other problems, but he pressed forward with the paintings. By the end of its run sixteen years later, the gallery’s inventory had climbed to around 170 paintings, and Boydell had done much to fix Shakespearian visual imagery in the popular mind.