Printer's Error

by Rebecca Romney

  95Africa was treated as a state secret: Burke, Social History, 143.

  95Roman architecture was considered too dangerous: Ibid., 144.

  96ensure demons couldn’t hide in his hair: Crane, Mercator, 104.

  97triangulation . . . back-pedaling . . . imperial ass-kissing: Ibid., 105–8.

  98“suspect letters”: Ibid., 136.

  99“constructing future transgression”: John H. Arnold, Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 85.

  100arrested at the same time: Taylor, World, 115.

  100“most unjust persecution”: Letter of Mercator to Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, October 9, 1544, quoted in Taylor, World, 116.

  100whole mess of problems: For more on the technical challenges of representing a sphere on a flat surface, see John P. Snyder, Flattening the Earth: Two Thousand Years of Map Projections (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 1–4.

  101not commonly known before Mercator: Snyder notes that “Erhardt Etzlaub (c. 1460–1532) of Nuremberg used similar projections for a small map limited to Europe and North Africa” in 1511, “but the principle remained obscure until Mercator’s independent development.” Flattening, 48.

  101hundreds of miles from his intended destination: Cf. Anson’s famous circumnavigation, when his “ships almost ran ashore on the rocks of the Chilean coast at a moment when the sailing-masters estimated that they were nearly three hundred miles out to sea.” Glyndwr Williams, The Great South Sea: English Voyages and Encounters, 1570–1750 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 10.

  102Columbus used Ptolemy’s calculations: Boorstin, Discoverers, 99.

  104bleed across the whole world: Monmonier, Lie with Maps, 96.

  104“south until the butter melts”: A sixteenth-century saying about sailing to the West Indies from Europe, quoted in William Galvani, Mainsail to the Wind: A Book of Sailing Quotations (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Sheridan House, 1999), 71.

  105inevitable land mass distortions: Crane, Mercator, 289–90.

  105distortion is coming for you: Ibid., 290.

  105imaginary Christian nation . . . hiding out in Ethiopia: It was moved to Ethiopia (at this time, Abyssinia) in Mercator’s era. After evidence against its existence came to light, the last gasp of the myth relied on scholars asserting that the name “Prester John” was a corruption of certain Ethiopian royal titles. Almeida is the first to dismantle that argument, saying that “there is no foundation whatever” for it. Quoted in Robert Silverberg, The Realm of Prester John (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1972), 319–21. Also see Keagan Brewer, comp. and trans., Prester John: The Legend and Its Sources (Surrey: Ashgate, 2015).

  106instead of for our yahoos: Questions on Yahoo Answers from May 4, 2012 (https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120504132447AAweXOA); January 26, 2008 (https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=2008012 6235022AAPDIDx); and October 30, 2012 (https://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20121030224201AAnKzZZ). The top-rated answer to the last question is “Can you be more Pacific?” People from 2517, go ahead and judge us for that answer.

  Chapter 5: Bad Shakespeare

  107“To die, to sleep”: William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 3, scene 1, lines 59–63. Quoted in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997), 1705.

  107“is that all?”: William Shakespeare, Hamlet Q1, transcription from the British Library copy (except the spelling out of “I” to “Aye,” as in some later editions, to avoid confusion), D4v. See http://www.quartos.org/lib/XMLDoc /viewXML.php?path=ham-1603–22275x-bli-c01.xml.

  107the “bad” quarto: The term was first used by A. W. Pollard in Shakespeare’s Folios and Quartos (London: Methuen, 1909).

  108“found by me in a closet”: The imprint was bound in a collection of Shakespeare plays, one reason it may have taken so long to discover it. Sir Henry Bunbury, ed., The Correspondence of Sir Thomas Hanmer, Bart, Speaker of the House of Commons, with a Memoir of his Life (London: Edward Moxon, 1838), 80.

  108“at a tidy profit”: Zachary Lesser, Hamlet After Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 3. This friend of Charles Dickens was the well-known book collector William Cavendish, Sixth Duke of Devonshire.

  109presumably repentant British Museum: Ibid., 16.

  109best-selling playwright: Lukas Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 21.

  109even if they weren’t his: Ibid., 68.

  110“music be the food of love”: William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, act 1, scene 1, line 1. Quoted in Norton Shakespeare, 1768.

  110“I have done thy mother”: William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, act 4, scene 2, lines 75–76. Quoted in Norton Shakespeare, 414.

  110“if an editor likes a reading”: R. B. McKerrow, The Treatment of Shakespeare’s Text by His Earlier Editors, 1709–1786 (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 28.

  110“authentic” Shakespeare play: Spoilers: authentic is in quotes because it’s not a terribly practical way to understand Shakespearean authorship, as demonstrated by the historical context described in this chapter.

  110“historically based editorial practice”: Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book, 100.

  111start tossing them out: Even the great libraries weren’t immune, such as the Bodleian “discarding” its First Folio after obtaining a Third Folio. See Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade, 192.

  111seemed to show metrical errors: In fact these verses were, as later scholars have pointed out, “entirely acceptable when accorded their more flexible Elizabethan and Jacobean pronunciation.” Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 62–63.

  111fifteen hundred “degraded”: Ibid., 197.

  112“Shakespearean controversy has given birth”: Thomas R. Lounsbury, The First Editors of Shakespeare (Pope and Theobald): The Story of the First Shakespearean Controversy and the Earliest Attempt at Establishing a Critical Text of Shakespeare (London: David Nutt, 1906), xi.

  112his publisher turned traitor: Andrew Murphy, “The Birth of the Editor,” in A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text, ed. Andrew Murphy (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 96. It should be noted that Theobald also went on to edit (and alter) Shakespeare according to his own morally inflected judgments.

  112“suspicions of depravity”: As quoted in De Grazia, who emphasizes Theobald’s suspiciously moralizing vocabulary: Depravities, Deformities, Blemishes. Verbatim, 198–99.

  112most blasé . . . is the man himself: Erne challenges this interpretation using circumstantial evidence, but there is no direct evidence.

  112Plays were usually sold to a theater team: David Grote, The Best Actors in the World: Shakespeare and His Acting Company (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 22.

  112free to make changes to the text: Tiffany Stern, Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page (London: Routledge, 2004), 57.

  113“nothing too seditious or blasphemous”: Ibid., 154.

  113“c’s, her u’s, and [’n’] her t’s”: William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, act 2, scene 5, lines 77–78. Quoted in Norton Shakespeare, 1791.

  113euphemism for vagina: Gordon Williams, Shakespeare’s Sexual Language: A Glossary (London: Continuum, 2006), 219.

  113abridged traveling version: This theory, relying on a sort of “country bumpkin” argument, has seemed less convincing in recent years. Leah S. Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London: Routledge, 2002), 150–52.

  113memorial reconstruction: While not first proposed by W. W. Greg, this theory was popularized by him in his introduction to his 1910 Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor. In 1915, Henry David Gray argued that the bit actor playing Marcellus was responsible for the memorial reconstruction of the “bad” Hamlet, in
“The First Quarto Hamlet,” Modern Language Review, 10 (1915): 171–80.

  113“corrupt and mangled (copied only by ear)”: Thomas Heywood, “To the Reader,” in The Rape of Lucrece (London: Printed [by E. Allde] for I. B[usby] and are to be sold [by Nathaniel Butter], 1608), sig. A2r.

  113questionable just how widespread: In correspondence with the authors, Adam Hooks noted this practice was more common for sermons, and that in fact it is one more way for editors to blame other forces for the less pleasing parts of Shakespeare’s plays.

  114“make so bold with his name”: Thomas Heywood, Apology for Actors (London: Nicholas Okes, 1612), sig. G4r.

  114“deemed worthy”: Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade, 73.

  114“a name to make money”: Ibid., 59.

  114removed Shakespeare’s name: Adam Hooks pointed out in correspondence that Colin Burrow makes the opposite argument in his Oxford edition of Shakespeare. Welcome to Shakespearean criticism.

  115“how little we know”: James J. Marino, Owning William Shakespeare: The King’s Men and Their Intellectual Property (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 72.

  115eighty-three variants: Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” in Shakespeare and the Editorial Tradition, ed. Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen (London: Taylor and Francis, 1999), 19.

  115condemned to have his name misspelled: Randall McLeod, “Un ‘Editing’ Shak-speare,” SubStance 10/11 (vol. 10, no. 4; vol. 11, no. 1), Issue 33–34: Books: On and About (1981/1982): 4546. Note that this practice doesn’t specifically apply to Roman letters; however, the principle remains that our spelling of Shakespeare derives from printed matter, not manuscript—including Shakespeare’s own writing.

  115“authors do not write books”: Roger Stoddard, “Morphology and the Book from an American Perspective,” Printing History 17, vol. 9, no. 1 (1987): 4.

  116“fills bibliographers with horror”: Thomas L. Berger, “Shakespeare Writ Small” in Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text, ed. Andrew Murphy (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 68.

  116follically challenged wild animals: Stern, Making Shakespeare, 151. This is also where we note that the editorial choice of standardizing spelling and punctuation for ease of reading—as we do in this book, have mercy on our souls—can actually erase important textual evidence. The white beares/white beards mistake can’t be seen if you normalize the spelling to “bears.”

  116had just run out of periods: Ibid., 152.

  116gets a name change to “Bastard”: Ibid., 152–53.

  117“collection” of great Elizabethan dramas: Jeffrey Todd Knight makes the distinction that most “collections” of bound plays from this era were determined by a reader buying up each play separately and then binding them together at a point of his choosing. However, some publishers learned early on that there could be benefits to printing certain plays at the same time, when they could sell the two or three either individually or together as a sort of collection. See Tara L. Lyons, “Serials, Spinoffs, and Histories: Making ‘Shakespeare’ in Collection before the Folio,” Philological Quarterly 91, no. 2 (2012): 185–220; and Jeffrey Todd Knight, “Making Shakespeare’s Books: Assembly and Intertextuality in the Archives,” Shakespeare Quarterly 60 (2009): 304–40. All that said, the 1619 collection was the largest group up to that point of Shakespeare plays printed more or less consecutively and under the supervision of a single publisher (Jaggard).

  117ale, beer, and “other gross wares”: We know this because, of course, someone complained about it. See the August 5, 1554, Proclamation of the Lord Mayor, quoted in William Benham, Old St. Paul’s Cathedral (London: Seeley and Co., 1902), 47.

  118respectable heart of the London book trade: See Peter W. M. Blayney, The Bookshops in Paul’s Cross Churchyard (London: Bibliographical Society, 1990) for a full treatment.

  118went blind from his STD or its “cure”: Jillian Linster, “When ‘Nothing’ Goes Missing: The Impotent Censorship of Helkiah Crooke’s Mikrokosmographia,” paper presented on March 10, 2013, https://crookebook.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/crooke-images-paper-3–10–13.pdf.

  118pornographic indecency: Ibid.

  118“vaginal cleft in full anatomical detail”: Ibid.

  119first comprehensive anatomy volume: Ibid.

  119remain free from moral corruption: Like when Samuel Pepys purchased a “mighty lewd book,” which “doth me no wrong to read for information sake.” Right. He adds, “(but it did hazer my prick para stand all the while and una vez to decharger),” mixing in foreign languages for the scandalous bits, in the grand tradition that Edward Gibbon would follow one hundred fifty years later. Gibbon made copious use of Latin in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89) in these cases: “My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the decent obscurity of a learned language.” Samuel Pepys, diary entry for February 9, 1668, quoted in The Illustrated Pepys: Extracts from the Diary, ed. by Robert Latham (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 173–74. Gibbon, Vindication (London: 1779).

  119“burn it wherever he found it”: Linster, “Nothing.”

  119The college yelled at her for a while: Ibid.

  120yearly salary of around two hundred pounds: Andrew Gurr, The Shakespeare Company, 1594–1642 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 115.

  120cost of attending university: J. Payne Collier, Memoirs of the Principal Actors in the Plays of Shakespeare (London: Printed for the Shakespeare Society, 1846), 147.

  120“great living wealth and power”: Quoted in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 323.

  121king’s personal eye candy: Gurr, Shakespeare Company, 51.

  121illegal for anyone to publish a play of Shakespeare: Transcribed in William A. Jackson, ed., Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company: 1602–1640 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1957), 110.

  122branded the Pavier Quartos: Technically there are only five imprints of “Printed for T.P.,” but The Whole Contention was a combination of two plays, therefore making the Pavier attribution appropriate for six in total.

  122rejected from the canon as apocryphal: See Peter Kirwan, Shakespeare and the Idea of Apocrypha (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

  122smashed the surplus theory . . . watermarks . . . “devices”: W. W. Greg, “On Certain False Dates in Shakespearean Quartos,” The Library, New Series, 9, no. 34 (1908): 122–23 and 131.

  123Jaggard Quartos: Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass, “Shakespeare Between Pamphlet and Book,” in Shakespeare and Textual Studies, ed. Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 133.

  124branded literary pirates: A. W. Pollard, Shakespeare’s Fight with the Pirates and the Problems of the Transmission of His Text (London: A. Moring, 1917).

  124McKerrow device #283: Ronald B. McKerrow, Printers’ and Publishers’ Devices in England and Scotland, 1485–1640 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1913). Yes, there are literally entire dictionaries compiled of printers’ devices.

  124known who printed the item: Marino, Owning Shakespeare, 108–9.

  125ornately designed “Go hang yourselves”: Particularly argued by Marino in ibid., 114.

  125oversaw all printing in London: See Peter W. M. Blayney, The Stationers’ Company and the Printers of London, 1501–1557 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

  125patents . . . biased royal meddling: Joseph Loewenstein, The Author’s Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 29. See, for example, the fabulous career of John Wolfe, whose business was raided again and again for piracies. He kept fighting the existing printing laws, even from jail, and in the end landed a cushy gig as the company beadle of the stationers: the man in charge of the search, seizure, and arrest of anyone breaking the laws of the book trade.

  126“print
ed without the consent”: Jackson, Records, 110.

  126inherited or traded or sold: See Loewenstein, Author’s Due, esp. p. 120, about business deals with monopolies.

  126Heywood’s Woman Killed: See Lesser and Stallybrass, “Pamphlet,” 127. The inclusion of a Heywood play plus two apocryphal Shakespeare works (Sir John Oldcastle and Yorkshire Tragedy) and the high degree of variability in the order of the works in surviving bound copies suggest that “Jaggard appears to be going to great lengths to convince someone (who?) that what might appear to be a ‘Shakespeare collection’ is actually highly variable—and therefore unlikely to be the work of a bookseller [but of private owners]” (ibid., 132). Note that Lesser and Stallybrass aren’t willing to commit to the idea that Jaggard was specifically trying to fool the King’s Men players, although they are not explictly discounted.

  126rights . . . obtained for publication: Marino, Owning Shakespeare, 130–31.

  126“clotpoles”: Cf. William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, act 2, scene 1, line 118-ish.

  127his own dear “orphans”: John Heminges and Henry Condell, dedication to Mr. William Shakespeares comedies, histories, and tragedies. Published according to the true originall copies (London: Isaac Jaggard, and Ed. Blount, 1623), A2v.

  127“Do so, but buy it first”: Heminges and Condell, “To the Great Variety of Readers,” in ibid., A3r.

  127making money off the process: In fairness to their mercenary urges, it’s more likely Heminges and Condell would have made their money indirectly, from encouraging Shakespeare’s reputation as a playwright, rather than from actual sales of the book.

  127dead husband’s shareholdings: Gurr, Shakespeare Company, 230. Another classic example of learning biographical details through the record of lawsuits.

  127owned a country home: Grote, Best Actors, 218.

  127February 1622, printing began: Peter W. M. Blayney, The First Folio of Shakespeare (Washington, DC: Folger Library, 1991), 5.

  127“incomparably the most important work in the English language”: E. V. Unger and W. A. Jackson, eds., The Carl H. Pforzheimer Library: English Literature, 1475–1700, vol. 3 (New York: Morrill Press, 1940), 935.