The Lord Chamberlain’s edict of May 1619 read, “[N]o plays that his Majesties players do play shall be printed without the consent of some of them.” To printers such as William Jaggard, these kinds of royal favors were nothing less than attacks on the very foundation of intellectual property as it was practiced in the seventeenth century.
Playwrights such as Shakespeare usually sold their play texts to an acting company, and as far as they were concerned, that was the end of it. When a person purchased and then registered a play with the Stationers’ Company, he or she held the rights to print and distribute it. The play could also be inherited or traded or sold to other companies or private citizens. This was the case for Jaggard and Pavier, who paid for, or otherwise gained the rights to, six of the eleven plays in the proposed “collection” (2 and 3 Henry VI, A Yorkshire Tragedy, Henry V, Sir John Oldcastle, and Heywood’s Woman Killed, found in some bound copies of this group). Of the remaining five, Jaggard and Pavier might have had loose claims to three of them (Pericles, The Merchant of Venice, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream), and the rights to the last two (The Merry Wives of Windsor and King Lear) were obtained for publication from their legal owners.
While the Stationers’ Company had no recourse against a royal edict that instantly made worthless any titles that Pavier had previously purchased, it could (and apparently did) look the other way while Jaggard took the printing underground and slapped a big Suck it, you clotpoles! on the title page. Heminges and Condell, who were not stationers, would probably have missed the insult. Anyone who understood the world of print would not.
Heminges and Condell may have had another motivation for tattling to the Lord Chamberlain in 1619. Either before Jaggard began printing the Pavier Quartos, or at least very soon thereafter, the leading duo of the King’s Men started planning the release of their own collection of Shakespeare’s plays.
SHAKESPEARE HAD died a few years before, and Heminges and Condell were committed to gathering up and succoring his plays as if they were his own dear “orphans.” A moment’s reflection would reveal what a deadbeat this would make Shakespeare, since he sold his kids for eight pounds apiece and then walked out on them forever. Nevertheless, Heminges and Condell stated they just wanted “to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive.” They also wanted to make sure you purchased a copy of their book: “The fate of all books depends upon your capacities,” they would write in a special note to “the great variety of readers”: “and not of your heads alone, but of your purses . . . stand for your privileges we know: to read, and censure. Do so, but buy it first. That doth best commend a book.” They cared about preserving the reputation of their dear, departed friend, yes, but making money off the process was also their solemn duty to bear.
Much could be said of Heminges and Condell’s business acumen. They were competent accountants, each owned a quarter of the King’s Men theaters, and they had grown considerably wealthy. Heminges’s own daughter, Thomasine, unsuccessfully sued him after he repossessed her dead husband’s shareholdings, and Condell reportedly owned a country home. (Owning a summer home is considered ritzy no matter what era you live in.) More than anything else, though, their contributions to the Shakespeare canon have become their true legacy, and those contributions cannot be understated, no matter what copyright traditions they may have trampled along the way. We take jabs here and there, but ultimately we owe Heminges and Condell an unpayable debt of gratitude.
Around February 1622, printing began on Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, remembered by the world today simply as the First Folio. This landmark publication has been called, in classic canonical book-speech, “incomparably the most important work in the English language.” Of the thirty-eight (or thirty-nine) plays known to be authored by Shakespeare, eighteen of them (almost half) appear here for the first time, meaning they still exist only because of this collection. Without the efforts of Heminges and Condell, there would be no Macbeth, no Twelfth Night, no Julius Caesar.
The printing of thirty-six full-length plays was no small undertaking, especially because the 866-page tome was going to be printed in the much larger, taller folio format (around 81/2 x 133/8 inches), rather than the usual quarto size (around 63/4 x 8½ inches). For years, Shakespeare’s plays had been printed not as books per se, but as little quarto pamphlets, roughly stitched up the side, not meant for the lasting reverence bestowed on stately bound books. If you look closely at many quartos that have survived today, you can still see the delicate stab holes made by the needles.
Not just any printer would have been able to pull off a collection of this magnitude. Heminges and Condell needed someone who had connections with copyright holders. They needed someone who was willing to blaze new trails in printing, and who had the economic security to follow through. They needed someone who wasn’t afraid to stand up to mockery and intimidation. They needed William Jaggard.
Of the great ironies in Shakespeare studies, this collaboration between Jaggard and the King’s Men to create one of the most important books in Western literature certainly tops the list. No one really knows how aware Heminges and Condell were of Jaggard’s subversive printing practices, but it’s likely the old bastard had flung around his share of colorful epithets regarding the two actors who, just a couple of years before, had so thoroughly assaulted the sovereignty of printing rights.
By the time the First Folio was started in 1622, Jaggard already had one foot in the grave, and perhaps that was for the best. He certainly would have been aware that all the plays from Pavier’s aborted quartos made it into the King’s Men’s collection (minus the Heywood, the two apocryphal texts, and Pericles, which was only partially written by Shakespeare). Adding insult to injury, the preface written by Heminges and Condell contained this bold statement: “As where (before) you were abused with diverse stolen, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious imposters . . . [they] are now offered to your view cured, and perfect of their limbs.”
Did Heminges and Condell know that Jaggard was one of those frauds and stealths who engaged in the amputation of their friend’s limbs? Did they know he would have scoffed at the idea of copyright nullifiers accusing him of diverse stolen and surreptitious activity? Probably not. Heminges and Condell would have gained little from pissing off their printer. But those statements wouldn’t have escaped Jaggard’s attention. And who knows, perhaps he died in the fall of 1623, right before the release of the First Folio, out of pure spite. Or maybe it was the STDs.
Jaggard’s son Isaac had been taking on increasing responsibilities at the printing shop since his father’s eyesight failed ten years before. By 1620 he was likely running the everyday operations. On November 4, 1623, a few weeks after his father’s death, Isaac had taken over the shop and received the title of Printer to the City of London in his father’s place. He was more than capable of carrying on his father’s legacy. Even so, the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio was a risky endeavor.
A visionary man named Edward Blount can be credited as one of the most important investors to help make Shakespeare’s collection a reality. A printer himself, Blount believed in great literature and had a reputation as a “literary arbiter of taste.” The man had the unique pleasure of publishing works by some of the most accomplished writers of his time—and of all time: Marlowe, Montaigne, Cervantes. There’s no doubt he was a deep admirer of literature or that he derived immense satisfaction from bringing great writers to print. That’s a good thing, because it was entirely possible that this satisfaction might have been the only compensation he received. According to Shakespeare scholar David Kastan, “The commercial context of the folio must not be forgotten. Today it seems obvious to us that the volume was the necessary and appropriate memorial to England’s greatest playwright, but at the time all that was clear to Blount and his partners was that they had undertaken an expensive publishing project with no certainty of recovering their con
siderable investment.”
Yet what could be so risky about an anthology from the most popular writer in England? Well, let’s start with the physical book itself. In particular, the decision to print it in folio format. Plays, ballads, and other silly works of pop culture were typically printed in smaller, cheaper quarto or octavo sizes. They were meant to be read and then misplaced, or dropped out a window, or thrown at your servants. Folio, on the other hand, was the most dignified format for Elizabethan publishing. Theological commentaries were printed as folios. Historical compilations and legal works were formatted as folios. Writers were admitted into the folio club, but only if they were very good or very dead: Homer, Aristotle, Pliny the Elder.
When Heminges, Condell, Jaggard, and Blount decided they needed to print Shakespeare’s plays in folio format, they were sending an unmistakable message: Shakespeare, though dead just seven years, had already become a classic. The Bard could stand shoulder to shoulder, bookshelf to bookshelf, with the likes of Plato, Ovid, and Vergil. “He is not of an age, but for all time!” wrote fellow playwright Ben Jonson. Which is nice, but if you dared publish an author in folio format who was not deemed a giant among men, people would mock the hell out of you. Ben Jonson would have known; he tried it.
In 1616, the year Shakespeare died, Jonson attempted to raise dramatic arts to the heights of fine literature when he published his Works, a collection of his own poems, plays, and entertainments, in folio format. Critics condemned him for his arrogance. “Pray tell me, Ben, where doth the mystery lurk, / What others call a play you call a work” (which was presumably followed by a seventeenth-century mic drop).
If readers accepted the idea that a pop culture playwright was worthy of the highest honors in the world of print, then the folio might succeed. If not, people would look at the folio in the same way a modern observer might view a gold-embossed, leather-bound edition of a romance novel such as Pirate’s Ransom, A Recipe for Temptation, or Master of Desire (all actual, and delightfully awful, book titles).
Even if people could be sold on the idea that Shakespeare should be regarded as one of the greatest English writers, the price of the folio itself still posed a significant hurdle. Printing was not cheap. For a nice copy of the folio, bound with calf boards, you’d be looking at about one pound retail. You could get the volume as unbound sheets, but that would only knock around five shillings off the sticker price.
One pound was a substantial amount of money in 1623, equal to about a month’s supply of bread. It should be noted that if you were patient, Shakespeare’s First Folio would eventually have paid out. In 1623, a First Folio was worth the equivalent of 44 loaves of bread. By 1923, that same folio was worth 96,000 loaves of bread (feeding a family for roughly 182 years).
The First Folio was completed in November, less than two years after printing began. The first recorded sale was to a Sir Edward Dering, on December 5, 1623. Just looking at the numbers, it seems that the publishers’ gamble paid off, eventually. It wasn’t Harry Potter, but Shakespeare’s First Folio sold well enough to warrant a second edition, in 1632. “It broke no records, but selling out inside nine years was a respectable performance for a fairly expensive folio.”
While the First Folio was commercially successful, we would be remiss if we didn’t at least mention its curse. It has not escaped the gaze of history that most of those who participated in the creation of Shakespeare’s Folio were dead within four years. William Jaggard died during the printing. Thomas Pavier died two years later. Both Isaac Jaggard and Henry Condell died two years after that, with John Heminges following in three years. Edward Blount held out the longest, finally succumbing in 1632, nine years after the First Folio was completed. Is this mere coincidence? Are we really to believe that six men of varying ages could just die of natural causes in early modern England? The answer is yes. Absolutely yes. This was a time before penicillin, or washing your hands, or English anatomy books that described private parts. It was unfortunate that none of the publishers lived to see the Shakespeare Folio sell out its first run, but hey, if you want to live past forty, don’t be born in the sixteenth century.
Levity aside, there actually is a curse associated with Shakespeare. The epitaph on his grave reads: “Blest be the man that spares these stones, And curst be he that moves my bones.” Evidently Shakespeare was not only a playwright, but also a pirate who cursed his gravestone. When the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon was renovated in 2008, developers actively worked around the gravesite so as not to disturb the Bard’s bones and bring upon themselves a swashbuckler’s fate. In a classic Shakespearean twist, however, some of the Bard’s super-fans decided to ignore the curse. The archaeologist Kevin Colls recently discovered evidence that Shakespeare’s skull was likely stolen from its grave sometime in the nineteenth century. Hey, there’s nothing wrong with lovingly carrying around another human being’s skull, says Hamlet.
Based entirely on what we have left to us, it appears Shakespeare cared more about his skeleton than his Hamlet. He feared people touching his bones more than touching his plays. He stressed out over a section of church floor more than the Kingdom of Denmark. Shakespeare’s final, paranoid words were etched in stone, but his plays would live on only by the grace of other people working to preserve them.
“Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him,” Hamlet famously bemoans as he lifts Yorick’s skull and presumably curses himself, “Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a rore?” The answer: as far as we know, they are nowhere. Yorick is only briefly introduced in act 5, scene I, so his jibes and gambols and songs and merriment do not actually exist. Shakespeare never wrote them. And if people such as Heminges, Condell, Jaggard, and Blount hadn’t intervened on their behalf, the actions of Macbeth or Petruchio or Caliban would likewise not exist, either.
“If Shakespeare cannot with any precision be called the creator of the [Folio] that bears his name, that [Folio] might be said to be the creator of Shakespeare,” David Kastan has concluded. Whatever the motivations and the politics behind it, the printing of the First Folio in 1623 would eventually transform Shakespeare into a household name for centuries to come. Ben Jonson may have failed to bring literary respect to play texts, but where he failed, Shakespeare succeeded brilliantly, thanks in no small part to the printing press.
It may be impossible to say that we really know Shakespeare. What we think we know of him has been shaped by his admirers, his editors, his critics, and the printers who memorialized him. At one end of that spectrum stand Heminges and Condell, who claimed in the preface of the First Folio, “His mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.” In their caricature of Shakespeare, he made no mistakes at all. From his mind, to his pen, to the annals of time went his plays whole and unblemished. If that were true of Shakespeare, he would be the only writer in the history of the human race to which that statement could apply. Even God handed Moses a rewrite on Sinai. But aren’t Shakespeare’s gifts all the more marvelous because we know that he was a flesh-and-blood, imperfect person, just like us?
Whatever his “true writings” may be, there is no doubt that Shakespeare stands as a giant of Western literature. With the publication of his complete plays in the First Folio, he was clearly accepted by his English contemporaries as a writer of extraordinary skill. For the four hundred years since, printing presses have influenced and carried his words to every corner of the earth. At times the picture that emerges of Shakespeare is one that “pusles the braine, and doth confound the sence.” But, in the end, we would rather “beare those evilles we have, / Than flie to others that we know not of” (Q1, 1603, “bad” Hamlet, E1r).
6
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN MAKES IT RAIN
WHEN BENJAMIN FRANKLIN WAS TWENTY-THREE years old, arrangements were made for him to settle down and find a wife. Living on his own in Philadelphia, yo
ung Benny had it all. He owned his own home, a small printing business, and just a few years before, he’d purchased a “genteel new suit,” a fancy watch, and walked around with “near five pounds sterling” in his pockets. But does a home and a business and nice clothes and cash in your pockets mean that you’ve succeeded in Colonial America? It seems to be a pretty good yardstick for success in Philadelphia circa 2017. In 1729, however, Franklin needed a little more.
A wife was a necessity for a printer—not for the usual reasons of companionship, reproduction, and an excuse never to go on awkward first dates again. In eighteenth-century America, the profession of printing was a game of survival, and printers lunged at any economic advantage. One major advantage was a wife who kept the books, folded and quired printed sheets, ran the general store, and even pulled the press or composed lines of type. Franklin needed that kind of a wife.
A tenant of Franklin’s, one Mrs. Godfrey, took it upon herself to find Benjamin a match, and she seems to have succeeded brilliantly. By all accounts, the prospective bride was intelligent, attractive, and capable. You might even say that young Franklin was falling in love. But love doesn’t pay the bills, my friend, and Benjamin—he had bills.
As part of the negotiations, Franklin asked for a one-hundred-pound dowry to pay off his business debts. One hundred pounds was a bit over a year’s salary when he was working as a manager at a previous print shop. So take your annual salary, beef it up with a little overtime, and that’s the bill you hand your in-laws for taking their daughter off their hands. The young woman’s parents came back to Franklin saying “they had no such sum to spare.” Franklin suggested they might “mortgage their house.” After a few days, they countered with “[we do] not approve of the match,” which is the eighteenth-century equivalent of aw, hell no.
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