30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (6 page)

Print complicated the question of “literature” because with it poetry entered the marketplace. Poetry was sullied by “filthy lucre,” by indiscriminate availability, by promiscuous circulation, by commodification. As an Elizabethan proverb has it: “Manuscript is a virgin, the printing press a whore.”
²
The same negativity attached itself to drama as performed. Because the public paid to see it, it was a commercial transaction—worlds away from the private, gentlemanly world of court poetry. One version of the 1609 text of
Troilus and Cressida
carried a prefatory letter, probably by its publisher, promising “a new play, never staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar”: that the play had not been performed (this is probably untrue, and the alternative version has on its title page “as it was acted by the Kings Majesties servants at the Globe”) is presented here as attractive to potential readers, who are implicitly distinguished from “vulgar” playgoers.

Many Elizabethan poetry collections reached print posthumously, the author thereby innocent of self-promotion. Sir Philip Sidney died in 1586; his sonnet sequence
Astrophil and Stella
was published in 1591. Other collections reached print with prefatory material indicating the author's reluctance to publish, having eventually yielded to friends' entreaties. The title page of Thomas Watson's sonnet sequence
Hekatompathia
, published in 1582, tells us that the poems were “
Composed by Thomas Watson Gentleman; and published at the request of certain gentlemen his very friends
.” Others contained dedications and elaborate prefatory epistles, thus making the volume a tribute to an aristocrat, a gift to a patron, not a publishing enterprise. Shakespeare's first two published efforts were poems and they come into this last category:
Venus and Adonis
(1593) and
Lucrece
(1594) were both dedicated to the Earl of Southampton (see Myth 16). Neither title page identifies the author, but the dedicatory letters to the patron are signed “Your Honour's [
Lucrece
: Lordship's] in all duty, William Shakespeare.” So although the title pages are anonymous, the volumes are not.
³

When Shakespeare's plays reached print, they contained no authorial prefatory epistles. Prefatory epistles to drama were not typical but nor were they unusual. Webster wrote a prefatory letter to the
White Devil
(1612) in which he offers his views on tragedy and gives the history of this play's reception; Jonson wrote prefatory letters to
Volpone
(1606) and
Catiline
(1611), among others. Other kinds of pre-play matter indicate an author's involvement in the printing process or their attitude to it. John Marston dedicated his play
The Malcontent
to Ben Jonson; when Jonson published
Sejanus
in 1605, Marston contributed a prefatory poem to the edition; John Ford wrote commendatory verses for plays by Massinger, Webster, and others. Shakespeare's plays have nothing comparable. If Shakespeare had been interested in his plays reaching print, mightn't we expect to find him providing some critical commendations as he did with his poems or as other dramatists did with their plays?

Not necessarily. The statistics tell an interesting story. Dedications preface only five of the plays printed between 1583 and 1602 (5 percent); between 1603 and 1622 the number rises to twenty-two plays (19 percent of printed drama); and between 1623 and 1642 it jumps to seventy-eight (58 percent).
⁴
The figures are similar for other paratextual material—lists of characters, for instance. Drama was developing a printed identity—but slowly.

This fledgling identity perhaps also explains the stuttering way in which title pages identify authors of plays. The first Shakespeare plays to reach print did not have his name on the title page. The selling point of a play was its theater company: the marketing point that promised success for a printed play was the stage on which it had already been successful.
Titus Andronicus
was published in 1594, followed by
Richard II
,
Richard III
, and
Romeo and Juliet
in 1597; none of these identifies Shakespeare as the author but all of them name the theater company that had performed the play. In 1598 a change creeps in. When
Richard II
and
Richard III
were reprinted that year, they advertised Shakespeare as the author; so too did the 1598 reprint of
Love's Labour's Lost
(the first edition has not survived) although its phrasing “newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespeare” is ambiguous about whether Shakespeare wrote the original or just revised it. But the introduction of Shakespeare's name on title pages is not consistent. In Shakespeare's lifetime there were thirty-nine editions of sixteen of his plays: only 66 percent of these editions say “Written by William Shakespeare” or “Newly corrected by …” or “Newly augmented by William Shakespeare.” The concept of the author was not yet a title-page requirement. Anonymity cannot be taken as reliable evidence of Shakespeare's lack of interest in publication any more than the absence of prefatory material can.

Playwrights had little control over printing their plays. A dramatist who sold a play to a theater company had no subsequent rights over it. Authorial copyright is a development of the eighteenth century. Thus an Elizabethan playing company could do as it pleased with the text of plays that it owned. The issue is complicated by the fact that Shakespeare was a shareholder in the Globe. In this capacity, though not as a playwright, he would have shared in decisions the company made about buying and selling property (and a playbook was property).

The issue of whether Shakespeare was interested in seeing his plays printed is further complicated by the existence of variant versions of some of Shakespeare's plays. When
Romeo and Juliet
was first printed in 1597 it was in a relatively short version (2,225 lines, just about feasibly “the two-hours' traffic of our stage,” Prologue 12); reprinted in 1599 the title page advertised it as “Newly corrected, augmented, and amended,” and it runs to over 3,000 lines. Similarly, the first published version of
Hamlet
(1603) is short (2,155 lines), blunt, and at times even ungrammatical; within a year, a longer, more philosophically poetic version with subtler characterization was printed. The title page advertised the new edition as “newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much again as it was, according to the true and perfect copy,” and the figures bear this out (3,660 lines). The vocabulary of correction and enlargement suggests that someone in authority is replacing an unauthorized version—and this may reflect a Shakespeare concerned about damage to his literary reputation and hence keen to publish a creditable version.

Figure 2
This lurid description of the events of the play gives away a lot about its plot, but doesn't mention an author.

©The British Library Board, Huth 47, title page.

Trying to deduce the source of these “short” quartos has occupied critics for a century. Most agree that these versions indicate theater practice or intent. Stage directions choreograph the action:
Nurse offers to goe in and turns again
(
Romeo and Juliet
1597, sig. G2
^r
);
Fryer stoopes and looks on the blood and weapons
(
Romeo and Juliet
1597, sig. K2
^r
);
Leartes leapes into the grave … Hamlet leapes in after Leartes
(
Hamlet
1603, sig. G1
^v
). Did Shakespeare write a long version that the company cut down for performance? The argument against this is that it seems profligate for a writer regularly to write 3,000 lines if he knows a company will only play 2,000. Did Shakespeare write a short version for performance, then later expand it? Against this view comes the argument that some of the short quartos are distinctly unpoetic, linguistically divorced from anything we would expect that a Shakespeare might write.

However, Lukas Erne champions the idea of the longer versions as reading texts developed by Shakespeare from the shorter playing versions: Erne argues that the greater length, the subtler characterization, and the longer speeches are aimed not at a playhouse audience but at a reader, one who has the leisure to ponder.
⁵
If so, this is evidence of a Shakespeare who wrote for the theater but was also interested in publication: interested enough to revise some of his plays for print.

Although Erne's narrative fits the relative quality of short and long quartos (i.e. the differences between them), it does not fit the absolute quality of most play printing. Although short quarto versions are problematic, the longer quartos are far from perfect. Thus, Erne's theory obliges us to postulate a Shakespeare concerned enough with his reputation in print to want to present a fuller text but not so concerned as to oversee the quality of that replacement.

Let us turn to the concept of a canon. In 1616 Ben Jonson printed his collected works (plays, poems, court masques, entertainments) in a large folio volume. The notion of a collected canon including plays was not new: in 1570 Thomas Norton's
Treatises
included his collaborative play with Thomas Sackville,
Gorboduc
;
⁶
in 1573 George Gascoigne's
A Hundreth Sundry Flowers
included two plays.
⁷
What was new was the format (folio was a form reserved for serious works such as the Bible) and the title:
Works
(“Pray tell me, Ben, where doth the mystery lurk, / What
others call a play you call a work
?” wrote one wit.) Despite such derision, the idea was attractive enough to prompt two of Shakespeare's actor-colleagues, John Heminge and Henry Condell, to collect Shakespeare's plays and publish his Folio in 1623 (the volume took two years to go through the press).

The Folio collection of plays may have been Shakespeare's idea. In their letter addressed “To the great variety of readers,” Heminge and Condell wrote:

It had been a thing we confess worthy to have been wished that the author himself had lived to have set forth, and overseen, his own writings. But since it hath been ordained otherwise, and he, by death, departed from that right, we pray you do not envy his friends the office of their care and pain to have collected and published them.

Does this suggest that Shakespeare intended to “set forth” and “oversee” his own collected writings before he died? This could fit with what we know of Shakespeare's biography in his last years. Although he reduced his activities for the King's Men he does not seem to have severed his links with them (his purchase of the Blackfriars Gatehouse in 1610, his first purchase of London property, is not the action of a man who is retiring to Stratford). If, as we explore in Myth 20, Shakespeare is retiring from acting but not from writing in 1610, he may have done so to provide time for editing.

One more consideration needs to be factored into our discussion. In 1612 Sir Thomas Bodley, founder of the Oxford library that bears his name, told his librarian to exclude plays because it was not fitting that so noble a library should house “idle books and riff-raffs … baggage books.” Eleven years later, the Bodleian acquired from the Stationers' Company a copy of the Shakespeare First Folio and sent it to an Oxford binder (books were mostly sold unbound). Perhaps attitudes to plays had changed; or perhaps a folio collection of plays was viewed differently from the “almanacs, plays and proclamations” printed in separate small-format editions that Bodley objected to.
⁸
If so, Shakespeare may well have been interested in publishing his plays collectively while displaying no interest in individual volumes.

This myth actually splits into several: Shakespeare was interested in publishing his plays; Shakespeare was interested in publishing his poems. But the drama component itself subdivides: Shakespeare wanted his plays printed individually; Shakespeare wanted a Complete Works. Shakespeare himself left us no evidence to adjudicate these matters.

Notes

¹
 Francis Meres,
Palladis Tamia. Wits Treasury
(London, 1598), pp. 281–2 (sigs. 201
^v
–202
^r
).

²
 The Latin is “Est virgo haec penna, meretrix est stampificata,” quoted by Douglas Brooks in
Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 4.

³
 The letter to Southampton appears in the 1594 reprint of
Venus and Adonis
.

⁴
 Benedict Scott Robinson, “Thomas Heywood and the Cultural Politics of Play Collections,”
Studies in English Literature
, 42/2 (2002), pp. 361–80 (p. 366), citing Peter W.M. Blayney, “The Publication of Playbooks,” in John D. Cox and David S. Kastan (eds.),
A New History of Early English Drama
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 383–422.

⁵
 Lukas Erne,
Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).