5
BAD SHAKESPEARE
AFTER LEARNING OF HIS FATHER’S early death, Prince Hamlet of Denmark wallows in despair. He contemplates ending his own life, and from those pain-racked lips falls one of the most quoted monologues ever uttered:
To be, or not to be; that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep—
From the mind of Shakespeare, to his pen, to the words before you, Hamlet’s soliloquy is among the finest ever crafted by the great Bard. Or was it? There is another version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the earliest printed version, that is somewhat less refined in the philosophizing of the crown prince. “To be, or not to be, Aye there’s the point, / To Die, to sleepe, is that all? Aye all.” These yokelish lines belong to a version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that, for a hundred years, scholars called the “bad” quarto.
Single plays were most often printed in quarto format, meaning four pages to each side of a sheet of paper. In Elizabethan England, these quartos were roughly the dimensions of a cheap square paperback book. What made some of these particular quartos “bad” was how rough they were in comparison to later versions of Shakespeare’s plays. It’s like when someone says this is a “bad casserole.” You do not eat that casserole. It will make you puke your guts out. For almost two centuries, scholars felt the same way about “bad” Hamlet.
But what if the “bad quarto” isn’t really that bad? What if that quarto is just an earlier version of Hamlet? Or what if Shakespeare, arguably the most important writer in English literature, wasn’t really as good as we remember him today? And what if the Bard’s reputation was shaped, in part, by the people who memorialized him in print?
For two hundred years after Shakespeare’s death, scholars had no idea that an earlier version of Hamlet even existed. Then, in 1823, a man with the very English-sounding name of Sir Henry Bunbury stumbled across a copy at his Barton Hall estate, in Suffolk. He would later document this amazing find as a footnote to a memoir he was writing about someone else: “the edition of 1603, the only copy of which, known to be in existence, was found by me in a closet, 1823.” Bunbury writes this so nonchalantly that it would appear as if English closets were routinely the sites of astonishing discoveries. (Behind this closet door, a land of mythical creatures led by a talking lion. Behind this one, we keep a boy wizard. Behind that door, a previously unknown work of Shakespeare that will turn the literary world on its head.) Sir Henry Bunbury sold the collection to the booksellers Payne and Foss for £180; they quickly turned around and sold it “at a tidy profit” to a friend of Charles Dickens.
Thirty years later, a second “bad quarto” was discovered—likely hidden for so long because it was missing its title page—and sold to a bookstore in Dublin. Shockingly, the bookseller, M. W. Rooney, had a hard time selling this book at first. Since it was an incomplete copy, he was ignored by the British Museum, which considered his asking price too high. Yet this was literally one of the only known copies of the earliest Hamlet! Some of us would saw off our own pinky fingers just for a chance to hold the thing. Sure enough, a presumably repentant British Museum did end up purchasing the quarto through a private collector (for more than Rooney had initially offered it).
These two copies are all that have survived of the earliest-known printing of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The discovery of the 1603 Hamlet and several other “bad quartos” (including such well-known plays as Henry V, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and yes, even Romeo and Juliet) forced the world to face the very real possibility that Shakespeare may not have been as great as we remember him. Some scholars have spent their entire lives debating these points, fighting among themselves to explain how Shakespeare became Shakespeare.
To descend into the world of Shakespearean scholarship is to descend into a particular species of madness. Factions with names such as the Disintegrationists, the New Bibliographers, and the Revisionists rise like Elizabethan houses to duel one another with collating machines and proof sheets and watermark catalogues. They lob insults at one another: “Bardolator” (bard + idolatry) and “Bardoclast” (bard + iconoclasm). Diving into the nerdy carnage in their wake tests the mettle of any researcher, and at a certain point, you’d rather take a poisoned rapier to the heart than read one more goddamn textual criticism. But if you take anything away from the labyrinth of that scholarship, it should be this: what you think you know about Shakespeare may not be so.
Was Shakespeare the best-selling playwright of his time? Yes. Could just putting his name on a title page sell books, even if they weren’t his? Absolutely. Was Shakespeare an insightful storyteller whose writing ranged from the sublime (“Duke Orsino: If music be the food of love, play on . . .”) to your garden-variety smut jokes (“Chiron: Thou hast undone our mother. / Aaron: Villain, I have done thy mother”)? No doubt. But when we look at Shakespeare’s plays today, we simply cannot ignore that, on some level, centuries of editing have fine-tuned and honed what we know as the Works of William Shakespeare. The man who wrote these works was a real person whose fallibility and roughness has been smoothed out over time. Yet, stripping away that polished veneer is a worthwhile endeavor. Only by discarding the dust of our reverence do we get a clearer picture of the brilliant writer remembered by the world as William Shakespeare.
Now, not all scholars have agreed on this point. The struggle to keep Shakespeare on his pedestal has influenced how editors have presented his plays to generations of readers who were happily ignorant of the warfare raging behind the scenes. As scholar R. B. McKerrow summarized in 1933, “if an editor likes a reading, that reading is (a) good, and (b) attributable to Shakespeare.”
It was more than just editors, though. Books are not a direct line from the minds of authors to their readers. Many people along the way have their hands in that cookie jar, and Shakespeare was no exception. Publishers, printers, typesetters, and even the actors and playhouses before them—all had an effect on Shakespeare’s plays. Almost all the changes they made to his work occurred without Shakespeare’s participation or after he was already dead. So how do we determine what an “authentic” Shakespeare play would have looked like?
Let’s take a minute and consider the famous eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope. In the 1720s, Pope edited an edition of Shakespeare’s plays that paid special attention to the earliest printed texts, following a “historically based editorial practice.” For instance, he took pains to compare different editions of the same play. This seems obvious today, but in that period it was a notable change in editorial philosophy. As an example, one of the reasons the fourth collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays (the Fourth Folio) survives more than any other is due to seventeenth-century buyers assuming it was the most up-to-date and therefore the most accurate. This mind-set prompted folks who owned earlier editions to start tossing them out after they had purchased the new one . . . a physically painful realization for any historian or collector. To twist the knife even further, the first collected edition of Shakespeare, the First Folio, today sells for between $4 million and $6 million; copies of the Fourth Folio sell for around $200,000 to $250,000.
Pope may have been the first to look back to the earliest printed Shakespeare texts, but even he wasn’t above tweaking the Bard. He would revise Shakespeare’s verse when it seemed to show metrical errors, and occasionally “update” the text for contemporary readers, removing verses or wording he didn’t like. He moved about fifteen hundred “degraded” Shakespeare lines to the footnotes, when he kept them at all.
Pope’s edition was viciously attacked by the scholar and translator Lewis Theobald in a 1726 work called Shakespeare Restored: or, a Specimen of the many Errors, as well committed, as unamended, by Mr. Pope in his late Edition of this Poet. Designed not only to correct the said Edition, but to restore the True Reading of Shakespeare in all the Editions ever yet publish’d. The criticisms in this snappy little title range from petty interpretations to major misunderstandings of Shakespeare’s work. Mostly, Theobald took issue with Pope “refining” Shakespeare’s style into what was trendy in the eighteenth century. In response, Pope made Theobald the dull, maligned chief of the dunces in his new poem, The Dunciad. This attack in verse is one of the crowning achievements of an era celebrated for its satirical bitterness. One scholar calls The Dunciad “the greatest work in English literature to which Shakespearean controversy has given birth.”
Writing one of the great works of verse of your era, however, doesn’t save you from legitimate criticism. After the dismal sales of Pope’s Shakespeare, his publisher turned traitor and chose Theobald, of all people, to edit their next edition of the Bard. Ouch. Of course Theobald had his own issues with Shakespeare. “There are very few pages in Shakespeare,” he wrote, “upon which some suspicions of depravity do not reasonably arise.” This cycle of suspicion is probably the single unifying link between the major editors of Shakespeare across hundreds of years. They all agree that the play texts are suspect, even if they can’t agree on anything else.
Surprisingly, the one person who appears to have been the most blasé about the interpretations of his plays is the man himself. Outside of possible rewrites (one of the many proffered explanations for the existence of earlier “bad quartos”), there is no direct evidence that Shakespeare was concerned with how his plays would be remembered.
This wouldn’t have been out of place for the time. Plays were usually sold to a theater team at a price of around six to eight pounds. Shakespeare worked with the Chamberlain’s Men, which became the King’s Men in 1603. He could sometimes offer revisions to his plays, but the troupe itself was free to make changes to the text as they saw fit. It’s a bit like authors selling their book rights to a film production company. Once sold off, the adaptation belongs to the company. It can do whatever it wants with it. It can make it way better than the original (as in the case of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather), or it can murder it and bury it quietly in the backyard (like James Franco’s 2013 As I Lay Dying).
Shakespeare wrote plays for the same company in which he was acting, so he likely retained some influence on the texts. Yet other people, including very powerful Elizabethan figures, made their influence known as well. After leaving Shakespeare’s pen, his work would have been perused by the Master of the Revels. If the title isn’t obvious enough, this actual member of the royal household was in charge of all royal festivities. He was also in charge of censoring plays to make sure “nothing too seditious or blasphemous was played on the stage.” Luckily, both for English audiences and for every eighth-grade literature class, thinly veiled references to lady parts were considered neither seditious nor blasphemous. (Reading a letter from his employer in The Twelfth Night, Malvolio says, “By my life, this is my lady’s / hand. These be her very c’s, her u’s, and [’n’] her t’s.”) At a time when the word nothing was a euphemism for vagina (no-thing), Much Ado About Nothing isn’t even trying anymore.
After the Master of the Revels granted his approval, a play could be altered to fit the needs of a particular theatrical troupe or performance. With its focus on action and plain language, one past theory of the Hamlet “bad quarto” suggests the play is an abridged traveling version used by the King’s Men.
As the play texts passed from actors to private investors to publishers and printers, changes were unavoidably made along the way. One particularly grievous theory of the “bad quartos” involves memorial reconstruction. Rather than making changes to a play text in front of him, memorial reconstruction involves an actor from a troupe, one with a bit part, reconstructing the play from memory, writing it all down, and selling it to a publisher. Thomas Heywood, a poet and playwright contemporary to Shakespeare, observed, “some of my plays have (unknown to me, and without any of my direction) accidentally come into the printer’s hands, and, [have become] therefore, so corrupt and mangled (copied only by ear).” However, it is questionable just how widespread memorial reconstruction was in Elizabethan England for drama.
The only instance of Shakespeare seemingly exhibiting displeasure comes to us secondhand, from the previously mentioned Thomas Heywood, but it wasn’t even about his plays. In 1599 a printer named William Jaggard published a collection of poems entitled The Passionate Pilgrim, attributing the entire thing to “W. Shakespeare.” As it turns out, only five short poems in the 120-page octavo had actually been penned by Shakespeare, and the Bard wasn’t too happy about this little advertising scheme. “The author [Shakespeare] I know [was] much offended with [W.] Jaggard (that altogether unknown to him) presumed to make so bold with his name.”
But here’s the thing: it wasn’t just Jaggard. Shakespeare’s name was big business, even while he was alive and kicking. No other playwright with the initials W.S. “was deemed worthy of publication” between 1590 and 1616, yet a number of play texts found their way to market with just those initials. Shakespeare scholar Lukas Erne borrows from Romeo and Juliet to make the point “What’s in a name? . . . money. [And] a name to make money with was ‘Shakespeare.’”
Scholars have been inclined to believe that disapproval from Shakespeare worked when it came to The Passionate Pilgrim because in the 1612 edition, Jaggard removed Shakespeare’s name from the title page. This dispute with Jaggard concerned Shakespeare’s poems, however, a much more respected literary medium at the time. When it came to his plays, we have no documentation for how Shakespeare felt.
It might best suit our purposes to avoid the black hole of time and hope that is Shakespearean textual criticism and focus instead on how the history of print influenced what we know of the famed playwright. That Shakespeare is one of the most important writers who ever lived is not exaggeration. That his plays have had a profound impact on four hundred years of Western civilization is beyond question. All this notwithstanding, it’s just a fact of history that we still don’t “know Shakespeare” (a little tip of the hat to the master of the double entendre). “Any tale that scholars tell about these plays must on some level be a story about how little we know, or our story will not be true,” observes Shakespeare scholar James J. Marino.
We might start with Shakespeare’s name. There are eighty-three variants. Not too surprising in a time before “the dictionary” or “standard spelling.” More important, we have six autographs that have been directly attributed to the Bard. The spellings range from “Shakspeare,” to “Shakspere” to even “Shakspe” and “Shak sp.” The common thread here is the notable absence of the letter e after the k in any of his signatures. So how did “Shakspeare,” which our spellcheck is highlighting angrily, become “Shakespeare,” which irritates exactly no spellchecks? The answer is the printing press.
When typesetting Shakespeare’s name, specifically in italics, the k and the antiquated long s (
) overlapped. Under the mechanical pressures of the printing press, the two letters tended to chip or break. In order to resolve this issue, compositors slapped an e between the letters, a typesetting practice called kerning. “Shak-” became “Shake-,” the k’s and ’s were saved, and the great Bard was condemned to have his name misspelled by everyone everywhere for the rest of time.
Both the inevitable processes of printing and the equally inevitable mistakes of compositors have had an impact on how we read Shakespeare, and we don’t even realize it. As book historian Roger Stoddard famously put it, “Whatever they may do, authors do not write books. Books are not written at all. They are manufactured.” This process of manufacturing leaves its own marks.
When planning the printing of a particular volume, printers had to estimate just how much text would fit on each page, a practice called casting off. If these calculations weren’t accurate, the compositor was faced with a real problem, since he couldn’t just hit Backspace and magically reformat the document. In these cases compositors might cram more text onto the page, or simply cut lines. There’s even the (remote) possibility that some lines were added to plays to pad out a block of text that was too short. As one scholar put it, “The worst-case scenario is that the compositor might feel compelled to add the odd word, phrase, or clause to fill out a speech and get it into a new line. The prospect of Shakespeare’s quartos containing material ‘written’ by a compositor trying to fill out a page fills bibliographers with horror.”
While the practicalities of casting off wouldn’t have had a huge impact on our interpretation of Shakespeare, typesetting mistakes certainly have. In Richard II, Sir Stephen Scroop approaches King Richard to inform him of how deep the rebellion against him runs. “White beares have armed their thin and hairless scalps against thy majestie.” Apparently King Richard was so despised that even the follically challenged wild animals of England were reaching for their swords—or the typesetter’s hand slipped into the e box of type, which sat next to the box of d’s After all, “White beards [old men] have armed their thin and hairless scalps against you” makes a whole lot more sense.
For years, people were confused about a seemingly nonsensical list of questions found in a speech in The Merchant of Venice—until it was realized that the compositor had just run out of periods and substituted question marks in their place. That doesn’t change the meaning at all, does it./?
In the middle of King Lear, “Edmond,” an illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester, gets a name change to “Bastard” in the stage directions and speech prefixes. Entire studies have been written on the significance of this appellation, as if the change showed that “his ‘bastard’ birth shaped and defined Edmond’s true self.” Or it’s entirely possible that the capital E, which was in heavy demand in a play text with frequent Enters and Exits, was sidestepped by calling [E]dmond “the Bastard,” a move that had no significance whatsoever outside the printing shop.
So the history of print mangled Shakespeare a bit here and there, but it made up for it by immortalizing him to the ages. Single quartos were printed sporadically throughout his career as a playwright, but the first attempt to gather his plays into a printed “collection” of great Elizabethan dramas took place in 1619, three years after his death. And who better to print those plays than the object of Shakespeare’s one recorded resentment: William Jaggard.
The printer of the falsely attributed Passionate Pilgrim was doing rather well for himself. In 1608 he purchased the business holdings of James Roberts, a well-respected London printer who had already published a few Shakespeare plays. By 1610, Jaggard was named the official Printer to the City of London, the nexus of which was the storefronts that lined St. Paul’s Cathedral.
At first glance it might seem odd that a cathedral churchyard could be the center of the Elizabethan book trade, but the architect of this bizarre state of affairs was the same as many other bizarre states of affairs in sixteenth-century England: Henry VIII. In 1534, Henry took upon himself the title of Supreme Head of the Church of England, effectively gut-punching the authority of the Catholic Church. This was followed two years later by a wave of legal actions that dissolved every monastery, convent, and friary in England, Wales, and Ireland. All income and assets were pillaged and turned over to the Crown.
St. Paul’s Cathedral, built five hundred years before, was appropriated and turned into a center of commerce. Overlooking the irony of Jesus casting out the moneylenders from the temple (or perhaps a blasphemous nod to it), the Catholic chapels, shrines, crypts, and other holy buildings in the churchyard were sold off as rental spaces to entrepreneurs, who were mostly Protestant. At one point, fish, fruit, ale, beer, and “other gross wares” were being sold in St. Paul’s, so in comparison, selling books there would not have been that odd. Books are at least two times more dignified than fish and six times more dignified than beer.
By 1611, St. Paul’s Churchyard was the respectable heart of the London book trade, and William Jaggard was the man to whom you waved as he sauntered by your wares. It’s unlikely Jaggard would have waved back, however. By 1612, William Jaggard, the Printer to the City of London, was going blind.
Ah, syphilis. In a time before penicillin, when the primary cure for syphilis was highly toxic mercury treatments, we don’t know if Jaggard went blind from his STD or its “cure.” Whatever the actual cause, by 1613 Thomas Milles, one of Jaggard’s clients, noted that the printer had lost his eyesight completely. Jaggard’s son Isaac was admitted that same year to the Stationers’ Company, which oversaw printing, and assisted his father in future business ventures.
One of the most important of these ventures involved an extensively illustrated anatomy book by the London doctor Helkiah Crooke (a regrettable name for any doctor). On the market by 1615, Mikrokosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man immediately landed both Crooke and Jaggard in hot water for pornographic indecency—not so much for the “body of man” as the “body of wo-man.”
Part of the publishing process in 1614 included submitting the text to the Bishop of London for censorship and approval. When Dr. Crooke did this, the Anglican bishop took particular offense at illustrations contained in “Of the naturall parts belonging to Generation,” which is doctor-speak for “This is the section where we talk about penises and vaginas, so let’s be adults please.” Only, surprise, surprise, the dickpics wouldn’t be the issue. Plate VI contains the drawing of a dissected female torso and abdomen, including the labeled reproductive system. Perhaps most scandalously in this medical encyclopedia is the “vaginal cleft in full anatomical detail.”
The Bishop of London immediately took the book to the College of Physicians. The president of the college looked it over and issued his own verdict: indecency. But not for vaginal clefts. The Mikrokosmographia was the first comprehensive anatomy volume to be published in English rather than Latin. The president of the College of Physicians didn’t like this one bit. If anyone could just crack a textbook and read the words, who knew what mayhem might ensue?
Even though England had won the battle for an English Bible, that was the Word of God, not pictures of naked ladyfolk. A responsible pedagogical illustration meant for educated men would transform into vulgar pornography if viewed by those who hadn’t been properly trained. Only educated men could get away with looking at nudity and remain free from moral corruption. A book containing nude pictures and written in the common English tongue might fall into the hands of people who were never meant to read about vaginas—women, for example. If the Mikrokosmographia were published without “the naturall parts belonging to Generation” being excised, the president of the College of Physicians threatened to “burn it wherever he found it.”
After attempts to intimidate Dr. Cooke failed, the college went after William Jaggard, summoning him to appear before an assembled court. But Jaggard was blind, and presumably didn’t feel like it, so he sent his wife instead. The college yelled at her for a while, then sent her back to her husband, confident that Jaggard would change his mind about the printing. He did not. Mikrokosmographia was published in the spring of 1615 with no changes made whatsoever. As far as we know, the Bishop of London took no further action, the president of the College of Physicians did not become a serial book arsonist, and the city didn’t collapse because women could read anatomically accurate descriptions of va-jay-jays.
Writers and scholars have at various times attempted to cast William Jaggard as a villain in the history of print. Charges of false advertising and forgery have followed him for hundreds of years. But there’s another picture of Jaggard that has slowly emerged from the historical record: one in which we see a defiant old printer who stuck to his guns when it came to censorship and the rights of printers and publishers. Did he imply that Shakespeare was the author of the collected poems in The Passionate Pilgrim? Yes. Did he bite his thumb at the Bishop of London and the College of Physicians when they were squeamish about feminine clefts? Also yes. Did he go blind from an STD? Irrelevant. Did he fake the title pages in a collection of plays prominently featuring Shakespeare? Okay, this one deserves a little more explaining.
Sometime in the early months of 1619, rumors likely started circulating that Jaggard, along with a prominent stationer, Thomas Pavier, was printing a collection of plays primarily written by Shakespeare. As far as we know, the two made sure to secure rights for the individual plays from the printers who owned them. No one would have cared outside of two very prominent members of the theatrical community: John Heminges and Henry Condell, both of the King’s Men players.
Heminges was the oldest member of the King’s Men, and a close acting partner of Shakespeare’s since the formation of the original Chamberlain’s Men in 1594. Besides his work with Shakespeare’s plays, Heminges is best known as the CFO of the acting troupe. He was one of the eight primary shareholders of the company, and quickly became their head accountant. By the time of his death, he personally held a quarter of the shares in both the Globe and the Blackfriars, the two theaters owned by the King’s Men. And at a yearly salary of around two hundred pounds (the cost of attending university, for example, was about thirty pounds a year), Heminges was described in 1619 as a man of “great living wealth and power.”
Few details are known about Heminges outside his interactions with the theater. Even less is known about his close financial partner, Henry Condell. Condell first shows up in the historical record as an actor in 1599, and four years later we find his name prominently displayed on an official list of King James I’s royal theatrical servants. He almost surely was among the twelve King’s Men who in 1604 were invited to travel to Somerset House as the king’s personal eye candy.
Although actors have not always sported the best reputations in society, in May 1603 (the year of the “bad” Hamlet), Shakespeare, Heminges, and Condell, among other King’s Men players, were invited into the service of His Majesty’s groom of the chamber. These lower-level courtiers were responsible for tasks such as handing royal clothing to a “squire of the body,” who would then dress the king.
The title was largely ceremonial, but some of the King’s Men did serve as glorified coatracks on at least one occasion when Spanish delegates arrived in London to negotiate peace with England in 1604. The King’s Men were instructed to stand around in their new scarlet cloaks, doublets, and breeches for eighteen days and look pretty. They weren’t to perform anything; they were just to demonstrate to the Spaniards that King James I could take very talented people and make them stand in one spot for two and a half weeks. In a receipt dated August 1604, the king commended his players for a job well done.
Heminges and Condell’s close relationship with the Lord Chamberlain (who oversaw the groom of the chambers, and under whom the King’s Men served as royal actors) proved highly advantageous when rumors started circulating of William Jaggard and Thomas Pavier’s forthcoming Shakespeare collection. The Lord Chamberlain issued an edict in May 1619, suddenly making it illegal for anyone to publish a play of Shakespeare’s without first securing the permission of the King’s Men players. Despite holding “rights to copy” for many of the plays, it appeared that Jaggard and Pavier’s project was shut down.
Then copies of the Shakespeare plays slotted for the collection began surfacing—as individually dated quartos. These quartos contained printing dates ranging from 1600 (twenty years earlier) to 1608 to 1619, just before the Lord Chamberlain’s edict. The words “Printed for T.P.” (Thomas Pavier) are found on six of the ten plays, and for that reason, they have been branded the Pavier Quartos. Except for two plays attributed to the work of “J. Roberts” in 1600, there are no immediately obvious indications as to who printed them.
For hundreds of years, it was believed that, after Heminges and Condell used their Crown connections to make printing Shakespeare illegal, Pavier abandoned the idea of a collected works and just started dumping his inventory. It was assumed that he had previously purchased surplus copies of Shakespeare play texts (printed in 1600 and 1608), which included such well-known plays as The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and King Lear. His personal collection also included the plays Sir John Oldcastle and A Yorkshire Tragedy.
(Side note: if you took a Shakespeare class in college and don’t recognize those last two titles, don’t worry, you weren’t so hungover that you forgot two whole Shakespeare plays. While Sir John Oldcastle and A Yorkshire Tragedy were at times thought to be the work of Shakespeare, they have since been definitively rejected from the canon as apocryphal.)
Presumably, Pavier halted the printing endeavor with Jaggard, sold off the last of his Shakespeare surplus, and then sat in a room with a slow-burning fire and a glass of sherry throwing darts at portraits of Heminges and Condell. But in 1908, W. W. Greg, one of the most influential Shakespeare scholars of the twentieth century, published On Certain False Dates in Shakespearean Quartos, and smashed the surplus theory to pieces.
Greg and other bibliographers demonstrated that, despite the claims on the title pages, all ten plays were printed together in 1619 in the same printing shop. Forensic evidence showed that paper from the same job stock was used in plays that were supposed to have been printed twenty years apart; that the unique watermarks created by the original papermakers didn’t match the proposed dates (Henry V, for example, was supposed to have been printed in 1608, but “appeared to have a watermark dated 1617 or 1619”); and the personal stamps (or “devices”) used by printers such as “J. Roberts” had clearly been stamped much more recently than claimed. (Even with the naked eye, it’s easy to see that the stamp used in one of these quartos allegedly printed in 1600 is actually older and more weathered than the same stamp from 1605.)
At the dawn of the twentieth century, almost three hundred years after the Pavier Quartos were created, judgment was finally passed: forgery. Perhaps most damning is the sequencing of the quarto pages. Because they were intended to be part of a broader collection, the first three plays (the two parts of The Whole Contention [2 and 3 Henry VI] and Pericles) were printed together, and therefore carried continuous signatures. “Signatures” are small letters printed at the bottom of the pages as a guide for putting sheets in the right order when binding.
After Pericles, the presses abruptly halted. When they started back up again, the last seven plays were printed with their own individual signature sequences. This would very strongly suggest that something significant happened in early 1619 between the printing of plays one through three and plays four through ten. Something like a plague, or a fire, or a meddling Lord Chamberlain.
Today there’s little doubt that William Jaggard was the silent printer behind the unlawful 1619 publications. Some scholars now suggest we should be calling this group the Jaggard Quartos instead of the Pavier Quartos. Not only did Jaggard continue to pursue the Shakespeare project, but he altered the title pages to make it appear that the plays had been printed before the Lord Chamberlain’s ban.
So we find Jaggard, now blind and four years from the icy grip of death, biting his thumb at the authorities once again. What would have motivated the old printer to do this? Money? Sure, that’s one explanation. Ideally, one makes money by printing things (fingers crossed). Though it’s unlikely Jaggard thought he’d be able to recoup his printing costs on a scrabble of play texts before Death came a-knocking for him. Jaggard and Pavier have been branded literary pirates by early twentieth-century scholars (most notoriously by Greg’s bibliographic buddy, A. W. Pollard), but recent studies have suggested a much different fight taking place.
It would be best to start with the evidence brought against William Jaggard. Did he forge the title pages? Yes. We absolutely know that. How? Because he signed the forgeries. Ladies and gentlemen, the prosecution rests because the defendant is clearly an idiot.
Or is he? When printing a book in this period, it was customary to include a unique ornament, or “device,” on the title page. Below this stamp, a printer would record his name, the place of publication, and the date. The forged Pavier Quartos have the stamp, but below that, just “London” and a false date. Here’s the thing, though, that stamp (McKerrow device #283, a rectangular woodcut with flowers in the center encircled by the Welsh motto “Heb Ddieu, Heb Ddim,” or “Without God, without all”) was Jaggard’s personal device. He’d been using it since 1610, and most recently in an official catalogue of upcoming publications printed nine months before the forged quartos. In the catalogue, the stamp is included on the title page with “London / printed by W. Jaggard / 1618” beneath it.
Any printer, publisher, bookseller, or bookbinder in London would have looked at that specific stamp and known who printed the item. Was Jaggard really that stupid, to use his own personal seal on a work of forgery? Was his syphilitic mind finally just giving out on him? Possibly, but some scholars have suggested that Jaggard’s stamp is an ornately designed Go hang yourselves, you malt-horse drudges from a printing curmudgeon who resented the King’s Men and the intrusive Lord Chamberlain.
This royal interference didn’t upset only Jaggard, but also the established practices and guidelines of the Stationers’ Company, the organization that formed the spine of the entire Elizabethan book trade. The Stationers’ Company was originally a guild of copyists, bookbinders, and booksellers that predated Gutenberg’s press by about forty years. By 1557 it had secured a royal charter and become the trade company that oversaw all printing in London.
Copyright as we understand it didn’t really exist in Elizabethan England, but probably the closest thing to it was the Stationers’ Register, which kept track of who had purchased rights to the publication of specific works. The Stationers were given power to run their organization without significant royal oversight in exchange for policing their own members, and their charter required them to seize or restrict publications that weren’t officially licensed. So, for centuries, the Stationers were the gatekeepers, preventing the London book industry from collapsing in on itself.
The only major exception to the Stationers’ autonomy was the royal prerogative to grant patents, which allowed certain printers (or, in even rarer cases, the authors) themselves the exclusive “privilege” to print popular works such as the Bible or annual almanacs. Printers would insert the words cum privilego on their title pages to announce that they held these royal patents, which voided anyone else’s previous rights to copy. This species of biased royal meddling usually doesn’t sit well with normal folks. It makes them do strange things, such as dress up as Native Americans and dump perfectly good tea into harbors.
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 considerable 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).