In the latter half of the nineteenth century, copies of the First Folio were scarce. And yet a determined man or woman of modest means could buy one. Sir George Grey—explorer, politician and linguist—bought two. Grey became Governor of South Australia and then of South Africa. In 1861 he donated more than 3500 volumes to the South African Public Library, including a First Folio. In 1894 he bought from Bernard Quaritch, for eighty-five pounds, his second First Folio. After paying a further three pounds to London booksellers Ellis & Elvey to improve the copy by replacing missing pages with genuine leaves and facsimile ones, Grey donated it to the Auckland Public Library.
Even in the early decades of the twentieth century a First Folio could be obtained with no great difficulty. England’s economy was changing. Aristocrats fell on hard times and had to sell artworks and volumes from those grand libraries that had harboured books since Shakespeare’s day. By mid-century, though, the First Folio bubble was well and truly inflating. The only buyers with deep enough pockets to afford a First Folio were oil billionaires and public institutions, most of them in Japan and America. Roxburghe member Sir John Paul Getty Jr was one of the few private citizens with sufficient resources. In 2003, he bought a fine First Folio from Oriel College, Oxford, for £3.5 million. Values dropped somewhat with the global financial crisis, but have since crept upwards. Today, a copy might command as much as $6 million, depending on its completeness and how many ‘flakes of pie-crust’ it had received in the servants’ hall. When the First Folio was first issued, it sold for a pound—a not inconsiderable price, though cheaper than Holinshed’s Chronicles.
The precise number of copies printed is unknown. Estimates range between five hundred and a thousand copies. Today, only about 235 copies remain; the number is imprecise because some incomplete copies are debatable inclusions in the census. What happened to the hundreds of missing copies? That is one thing we know for certain. Time is a destroyer of books. The lost Folios were sunk, flushed, flooded, gutted, eaten, mislaid, thrown out, blown up, pulverised, stabbed, recycled, buried, diced and used as food wrapping. Some were simply read to pieces. Fires such as those at Stratford (1641), London (1666), Ashburnham House (1731) and New Zealand Government House (1848) accounted for an unknown but significant number of copies.
In 1904, on behalf of publisher A. H. Bullen, Frank Sidgwick set up a press at Stratford-upon-Avon to print an edition of Shakespeare’s works in his birthplace. A local woman called at the printery; she had heard that ‘the young gentleman was interested in old books’. From her shopping bag she produced a volume that lacked its cover. Her children had scribbled in the book and torn pages out. Enough of it remained, though, for Sidgwick to identify it as a 1632 Shakespeare Second Folio, in even worse condition than the dirty, dog-eared, beer-stained, candle-singed, tobacco-ashed Perkins–Collier copy.
As nearly everyone knows, the First Folio was prepared by Shakespeare’s fellow actors John Hemmings and Henry Condell. Recognising their achievements in preserving Shakespearean texts, Bill Bryson called them the ‘greatest literary heroes of all time’. They wrote the preface and other preliminary matter, edited the plays and oversaw the printing. Except they very likely did not.
Editorial attribution of the First Folio to Hemmings and Condell passes into and out of fashion. Today, the balance of evidence points away from their editorship. First of all, Hemmings and Condell were stage players, with no apparent editorial experience, and certainly no experience with a project of the First Folio’s scale. They were comedic actors, and their inclusion as named editors could well be a joke. (Hemmings ended his life as a grocer; Condell, a publican.) More likely, the claim that they edited the Folio is a commercial exercise in branding; a way to confer theatrical authority on a book made by a printery, Jaggard’s, known for its piracies. From our journey so far, we know to view such preliminary matter with scepticism, and there are blatant falsehoods in this particular case. Notwithstanding Bryson’s generous words, it is likely Hemmings and Condell had as much to do with publishing Shakespeare as Barrington had with the eponymous voyage accounts. To identify the editors, we must look elsewhere.
The First Folio preface, ‘To the great Variety of Readers’, is followed by Ben Jonson’s dedicatory verse to Shakespeare, and by three shorter poems, attributed to Hugh Holland, Leonard Digges and ‘I. M.’, identity unknown. Jonson provided a grandiose poem with a grandiloquent title-cum-dedication:
To the memory of my beloved,
The AVTHOR
Mr VVILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
AND
what he hath left us
Jonson also contributed a ten-line poem commending (with characteristic ambiguity) the Droeshout portrait. Jonson, it seems, had a stake in the success of the venture.
Shakespeare in his lifetime was probably not a famous playwright, but Jonson certainly was. He had written more than fifty plays and masques, many of which appeared in print, as did his epigrams and verse. In 1616 he republished nine of his plays, plus thirteen masques and six ‘entertainments’, as a collected edition of his Workes. In 1623, entering the later part of an accomplished career, he was a celebrated man of letters, exceptionally well connected in the literary world and at court. Many times in that career he had been implicated in Shakespeare’s œuvre, and there are numerous hints that Jonson was also complicit in the First Folio.
A good case has also been made that John Florio performed an editorial role on the volume. Florio was a serious scholar and skilled translator. He had tutored at Oxford and taught languages privately in London. Among other publications, he produced an important edition of Montaigne’s Essays (1603). That book confirmed Florio’s reputation as a masterful editor and liberal provider of preliminary matter, ‘whether in the form of elaborate dedications, addresses to the reader, or verses in praise of himself by his friends’—‘His prefaces are masterpieces of pomp and decoration’. A similar liberality was of course also evident in the First Folio, on which Florio may well have worked alongside Jonson as a co-editor.
Without further documentary evidence, the division of labour among these and other editors cannot be pinned down. We do know Jonson had already edited and overseen the production of a folio volume of plays: his Workes of Beniamin Jonson, published in the year of Shakespeare’s death. Jonson understood what was involved in such a project. He understood the market, and had borne the jibes of detractors who accused him of confusing work and play, and who saw the Workes as folly, treating low drama as high poetry. The only significant single-author collection of plays before the Shakespeare First Folio, the Workes were so much a precedent that the two volumes can legitimately be considered part of a single endeavour. Readers certainly saw the books as two examples of a category: folio editions of plays for serious private appreciation. One day in 1623, Sir Edward Dering purchased Jonson’s Workes and two copies of the brand-new Shakespeare folio. Collector Humphrey Dyson was another early buyer who acquired both the 1616 Workes and the 1623 works.
The principal architect of the First Folio’s prefatory matter possessed both literary acumen and a hunger for the venture to succeed. The prefatory verses pump up the plays and position them in a literary tradition as poetry worthy of serious regard. Jonson’s commendatory poem speaks of Shakespeare in classical terms: ‘And all the Muses still were in their prime, / When like Apollo he came forth to warme / Our eares, or like a Mercury to charme.’ Apart from this reference, Jonson’s poem invokes the Muses three more times. Designed to encourage people to buy the book (and to accept the story of its author), the preliminary matter is overtly commercial; Shaw called the dedications ‘Beggars’ Petitions’.
Jonson was Shakespeare’s contemporary. The two men moved in overlapping circles and certainly knew each other. On 4 August 1600, four plays were listed together in the Stationers’ register ‘to be staied’: As You Like It, Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing and Every Man in His Humour. This grouping suggests the authors were associated, or that their plays had a common publisher or owner. Jonson and Shakespeare did indeed have publishers in common. Thomas Thorpe, for example, the publisher of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, published Jonson at least four times. Books and plays provide further documentary evidence of Jonson–Shakespeare connections; the two are referred to as fellows, and are known to have used the same source books. In 1610, Shakespeare and Jonson were both supplying plays for the theatre company known as the King’s Men. In his own writings, Jonson referred to Shakespeare’s plays and characters; the 1614 reference to The Two Noble Kinsmen in Bartholomew Fair is an example.
By that time, Jonson had settled into another important role: Shakespeare frenemy number one. Adept at homing in on the vulnerabilities of his contemporaries, Jonson left behind remarks about Shakespeare that are frequently critical and remarkably inconsistent. He based depraved characters on Shakespeare, and made fun of him in poems and epigrams, such as ‘Poet-Ape’, probably written shortly after The Poetaster, the play in which he ridiculed Shakespeare’s gentlemanly aspirations.
Six years after Shakespeare’s death, William Basse wrote about the Bard’s poetical stature:
Renowned Spenser, lie a thought more nigh
To learned Chaucer, and rare Beaumont lie
A little nearer Spenser, to make room
For Shakespeare in your threefold, fourfold tomb.
In the First Folio, Jonson rejected Basse’s idea: Shakespeare did not need to join the other poets as he was ‘a monument, without a tomb’. People have wondered ever since if that was an insult or not. It probably wasn’t; in the First Folio, Jonson was on his best behaviour. But other lines he left behind are more obviously derogatory. And Jonson interspersed them, perversely, with praise.
A note he wrote in the 1630s was found after his death and was published in Timber, or Discoveries Made upon Men and Matter (1640):
I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, ‘Would he had blotted a thousand,’ which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance who choose that circumstance to commend their friend by which he most faulted; and to justify mine own candour, for I loved the man, and do honour his memory on this side idolatry as much as any. He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent phantasy, brave notions and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that faculty that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped…But he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned.
In 1618 Jonson walked from London to Edinburgh, where he stayed with the poet and book-collector William Drummond, Laird of Hawthornden. Jonson made the journey as ‘a large, portly gentleman in his forties’. He was soon testing his host’s patience. ‘He hath consumed a whole night in lying looking to his great toe,’ Drummond wrote, ‘about which he hath seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and Carthaginians, fight in his imagination.’ The muttering playwright disparaged his fellows. Drummond wrote down Jonson’s claim, ‘That Shakspeer wanted arte…Shakspeer, in a play, brought in a number of men saying they had suffered shipwrack in Bohemia, where there is no sea neer by some 100 miles.’ The reference to a Bohemian shipwreck is in The Winter’s Tale, which Shakespeare wrote using Greene’s Pandosto. Shakespeare’s alleged want of ‘arte’ stands in stark contrast to the First Folio verse in which Jonson lauded Shakespeare in terms such as these: ‘Thy Art, / My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part; / For though the Poets matter, Nature be, / His Art doth give the fashion.’
Reverend William Beloe called the 1623 Shakespeare First Folio the ‘first edition of the works of our great natural Poet’. This description, and subsequent ones by Dibdin and others, have coalesced into a standard way of speaking about the First Folio. The book is Shakespeare’s ‘Editio Princeps’, his authoritative first appearance in print, which reproduced the plays precisely as he intended them. A recent description by Ian Wilson exemplifies this way of speaking: ‘The monumental First Folio, the authorised complete canon of thirty-six of his Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, put together by Shakespeare’s leading fellow-actors…With due allowance for inevitable minor infelicities of transcription, each play preserved in the First Folio is recognised as being very much as Shakespeare intended it.’ First, complete, authoritative. The First Folio is none of these things.
When the First Folio appeared, half its contents had appeared in print already—some as early as twenty-five years before. For the eighteen plays already published, the quartos are the true first editions. The First Folio is not even the ‘first collected edition’. Some quartos, including the ‘False Folio’ Jaggard–Pavier ones, had been sold as multi-play volumes. Irish scholar Edward Gwynn owned an extensive library that included eight Jaggard–Pavier quartos together in one volume (now in the Folger). Collectors also bound quartos together to create their own collected editions. Sir John Harington arranged for many of his plays, including Shakespeare quartos, to be grouped into composite volumes.
Part of the appeal of the ‘first edition’ concept is the idea of the satisfied author proudly handling the first copies of the edition as they come off the press. Shakespeare, though, never handled the First Folio; as already noted, he was seven years in the ground when it arrived. The quartos are the real thing, though the missing Shakespeare playscripts have an even stronger claim to ‘firstness’.
The statement that the First Folio is complete and canonical has obvious shortcomings. Shakespeare made his debut appearance in print with the publication of the long poems Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). His first literary reputation was as a poet. Decades before the First Folio, Shakespeare’s sonnets were circulating in manuscript. They first appeared in print in the small 1609 edition. The long poems and the sonnets, though, were excluded from the First Folio, as were a variety of poetical fragments that had been published under his name.
In another important respect, the First Folio does not include all of Shakespeare’s writings. Through a minor oversight, Troilus and Cressida was left off the contents page but included in the body of the Folio. In a much graver omission, at least four ‘Shakespeare’ plays, and as many as sixteen, were not included in the Folio at all.
Pericles, Prince of Tyre is one of the excluded plays. Registered in May 1608, the play was published in a 1609 quarto version under the name ‘William Shakespeare’. Advertising puff in the first quarto suggests the play was popular and extensively performed: ‘The late, And much admired Play…diuers and sundry times acted by his Maiesties seruants, at the Globe on the Banck-side.’ Contemporary sources corroborate this picture. Apart from attracting large crowds, the play was watched by the Venetian and French ambassadors. It was also performed by touring players, and was one of the most frequently reprinted of Shakespeare’s plays, appearing in at least six quarto editions up to 1635. Despite that strong start, however, this obscure play is not well known today, and is seldom performed. The text is notoriously uneven, slow to warm up, and not very ‘Shakespearean’ until the third act. In creating Pericles, Shakespeare probably made extensive use of a prior play by another author. To the extent that he revised the play, he seems to have done so with a collaborator, most likely George Wilkins.
The Two Noble Kinsmen is also not in the First Folio. Probably a collaboration between Shakespeare and John Fletcher, the play was created in 1613 or 1614 but not registered until April 1634. Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, first performed on 31 October 1614, referred to the character ‘Palemon’ from The Two Noble Kinsmen. The play was based on three principal sources: Chaucer’s ‘The Knight’s Tale’ and Lydgate’s ‘Siege of Thebes’, both of which appeared in the 1561 edition of The Workes of Geffrey Chaucer; and Boccaccio’s Teseide, possibly the French prose version La Theseyde (1597). Another First Folio exclusion, and another Shakespeare–Fletcher collaboration, is the lost play Cardenio. The Folio also excluded another lost play, Love’s Labour’s Won, along with the Shakespeare–Kyd collaboration The Reign of King Edward III (1596) and all the plays in the Shakespeare Apocrypha.
Apart from suffering from contentious exclusions, the First Folio also features some doubtful inclusions. Prior to 1623, nineteen of the thirty-eight plays in the canon (and eighteen of the thirty-six First Folio plays) had appeared in quarto format. Eighteen of the First Folio plays seem never before to have appeared in print. How they came to be included in the Folio is an enigma that goes to the heart of Shakespeare authorship and the scale of his achievements. The preliminary matter of the First Folio appears to convey a great deal of information, but in truth it holds a great deal back. It provides no details of how the playtexts were acquired, or the order in which they were written. It contains no biographical notes or authorial remarks. (Just as Shakespeare’s manuscripts are missing, so, too, none of the First Folio working papers, such as marked-up quartos, has ever been found. Only one fragment from the First Folio’s production is known to exist: a single page of the proofs for Antony and Cleopatra, now in the Folger.)
The list of plays published for the first time in the First Folio includes some of the greatest and most ‘Shakespearean’ texts—plays like Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew and The Tempest. The list also includes runts and outliers. The ‘misfit’ status of Timon of Athens has already been pointed out. The Comedy of Errors was registered just before the First Folio appeared; it was a late inclusion in Shakespeare’s œuvre. Some mainstream scholars attribute authorship of that play, along with another late First Folio addition, Julius Caesar, to Christopher Marlowe. If Shakespeare had a role in these two plays, it seems to have been a modest and incremental one. Alexander Pope was one of the first to express such a view. In 1728 he argued Shakespeare had only a minimal role in creating The Comedy of Errors. Pope cast doubt on other First Folio plays, too.
An equally plausible theory, however, is that Shakespeare had no role in several of the eighteen non-quarto First Folio plays. That theory has attracted many followers. In the years since Pope expressed his doubts, mainstream and heretical scholars alike have argued First Folio plays must have been misattributed to Shakespeare; that the First Folio editors and publishers simply selected, from a cache of available plays, texts that would fit in to the First Folio and could plausibly be passed off as Shakespeare’s.
In light of the ‘inbetweener’ view of Shakespearean authorship, and the Jonsonian–Floriovian view of First Folio editorship, that theory is entirely plausible. Jonson and Florio would have known the scale of Shakespeare’s authorship of the quarto plays. For these editors, therefore, it would not be much of a stretch to re-run the production process without Shakespeare’s vitalising stage—especially as the First Folio texts were intended for reading rather than performance. Jonson could have trawled the large body of available plays, found suitable works, knocked them into editorial shape, applied a degree of coherence with the other canonical plays, then sent them all to the printer. Common editing and presentation of the plays would have increased their ‘family resemblance’.
This picture is congruent with Philip Henslowe’s diary, which records him buying and staging plays with Shakespearean titles—such as Henry VI and The Taming of the Shrew—but with non-Shakespearean attribution and payment. It is also congruent with the evidence that Jonson had a stake in Shakespeare’s œuvre. And we know for sure that editors and publishers added plays to later editions of the Folio. By the Third and Fourth Folios, the number of ‘Shakespeare’ plays had risen from thirty-six to forty-three.
Jonson clearly had a motive to enhance the saleability of the First Folio. This commercial enterprise was undertaken when he was impoverished and indebted. The ‘make-weight’ of adding more plays would help justify the retail price and increase the perception of value, just as previous publishers had done by adding content to Hamlet; and just as the First Folio editors did by adding extensive preliminary matter—the portrait, the preface, the commendatory verses—running to eighteen supernumerary pages.
The bulky preliminary matter includes a dedication to Jonson’s patron William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke (a contender for ‘W. H.’ in the Sonnets dedication). The First Folio dedication paraphrased an impeccable precedent: Pliny’s dedication to Vespasian in his Natural History. Jonson’s 1616 Workes received a vigorous critical response and a satisfactory commercial one. Most importantly, the volume helped make the dramatic arts more respectable. For Jonson in that year, Shakespeare’s death may have planted a seed. The Bard was an ideal authorial vehicle for ‘volume two’, a way to repeat the venture and feed the public appetite with more plays, which Jonson would edit then see through the press. When it appeared, the Shakespeare First Folio reprised the model set down by the Jonson First Folio. It was a model others would re-use, including for Beaumont and Fletcher’s 1647 folio.
Apart from plays being left out of the Shakespeare First Folio, some jointly authored plays were solely attributed to his authorship. Thomas Middleton collaborated on Timon of Athens and possibly All’s Well that Ends Well, but he is not mentioned in the Folio. Marlowe, Greene, Peele and Nashe are also not identified as co-authors. Jonson knew all about collaboration, and he knew it disrupted the neat authorial story he wanted to tell in his own Workes. The prelims for that 1616 edition state, probably misleadingly, that the contents were all his; that in readying his plays for printing, he had purged from them the work of other men. In the preface to the quarto edition of Sejanus (1605) he similarly stated,
Lastly, I would inform you, that this book, in all numbers, is not the same with that which was acted on the public stage; wherein a second Pen had good share: in place of which, I have rather chosen to put weaker, and no doubt, less pleasing, of mine own, than to defraud so happy a genius of his right by my loathed usurpation.
If Jonson was behind the Shakespeare First Folio, he repeated this pattern there by gifting all the plays to Shakespeare alone.
Another objection to the picture painted by Beloe, Wilson and their ilk: calling the First Folio ‘authorised’ is baloney. The book was certainly not authorised by Shakespeare. The Folio editors created play titles he never used, and made textual changes he never reviewed. The preface denounced prior editions as fraudulent, and prior publishers as impostors, but we know from the Barrington books and the Wise case to take such protestations of integrity with salt. There were certainly pirates involved in the production of the First Folio, Jaggard principal among them (as noted, he had already been implicated in two Shakespearean misdemeanours: The Passionate Pilgrim and the ‘False Folio’) and there was certainly some fast and loose dealing with playtexts of dubious ownership. Let us be wary when pirates accuse others of buccaneering. Fundamentally, though, the ‘authorisation’ point is moot. In 1623, the likelihood of a competing bookseller or printer-publisher embarking on a rival edition of such a large and risky project was extremely low. Jaggard, Jonson and Florio had the field to themselves.
Faced with the opportunity to produce a monopoly edition of the plays, Jaggard and his collaborators fluffed it. As a piece of printing, the Shakespeare First Folio is a shoddy production. Executed ‘on the cheap’, the typography is certainly as ‘disagreeable’ as Dibdin labelled it, and as ‘botched’ as Shaw saw it. The end result was inferior to Jonson’s Workes, and vastly below the best Continental printing of that period. There were also editorial problems. The First Folio texts are full of mistakes. (A few examples from Antony and Cleopatra: ‘Anthony’ for ‘autumn’; ‘foretell’ for ‘fertile’; and ‘Thideus’ for ‘Thyreus’.) Shaw penned damning notes about the men who steered the Folio through the press. Apart from bungling the pagination, the editors left obvious misreadings.
Macbeth’s ‘If trembling I in habit then’…is misprinted ‘If trembling I inhabit then’ which is nonsense, and has been changed by later editors to ‘If trembling I inhibit thee’ which is little better, and not authentic Shakespear. Mrs Quickly’s vivid ‘His nose was as sharp as a pen on a table of green frieze’ appears as ‘His nose was as sharp as a pen and a table of green fields,’ which Malone, apparently ignorant of the fact that frieze is a very rough and tough woollen cloth with a rainrebuffing nap on it, much worn in Ireland before manual workers began to dress like gentlemen when off duty, corrupted into ‘and a babbled o’ green fields,’ which is neither good Quickly, good Falstaff, nor good Shakespear.
Malone, it seems, was fallible. He did excellent work, though, on the relationship between the folios and the quartos. He was one of a bevy of leading Shakespeare scholars who compared meticulously the texts of the First Folio and the even firster quartos.
Some quarto editions are demonstrably superior. In many respects, for example, the 1608 King Lear surpasses the First Folio version, which lacks about three hundred lines present in the quarto, and which contains many misprints, some of them carried over from the 1619 ‘False’ Jaggard–Pavier quarto. Some colourful parts of Shakespeare’s plays were left out of the First Folio. As Colin Franklin noted, ‘Thomas Bowdler, aware that here and there in Othello the 1623 folio was slightly less coarse of phrase than the quarto of the previous year, decided that the first folio could really be reckoned “the first Family Shakespeare”.’
Readers searching for the ‘best’ edition of Shakespeare’s plays should sidestep the First Folio. The very best editions—the most scholarly, thoughtful and complete ones—had to be carefully made up from the best quartos and folios. Editions of that editorial calibre were not available in the seventeenth century, nor for that matter in the eighteenth or the nineteenth.
When it comes to the search for information about Shakespeare’s life and authorship, the First Folio is an unreliable source. Posthumous, incomplete, error-ridden; produced by piratical publishers and hidden editors. The volume is prefaced with ambiguous prefatory matter that is deliberately misleading and patently commercial. The story of the Folio is useful, however, in shedding light on Shakespeare’s authorial achievement, and in helping in a practical way to scale his library. To the extent that some of the canonical plays are not his, for example, he probably didn’t have manuscripts or proofs of them. More importantly, the production of the First Folio helps us picture the work of a nearby bookman, and that bookman’s library.
The man who achieved a perfect score against Diana Price’s ten criteria was sure to have had a library. We know with certainty that he did so; in fact, Jonson assembled at least two libraries in his lifetime. John Aubrey’s Brief Lives included gossip about Jonson as well as Shakespeare. Aubrey portrayed him at his study at night, surrounded by documents, sitting on a ‘chaire…of strawe’ and affected by ‘drinke’. William Drummond verified Jonson’s love of liquor, recalling it as ‘one of the elements in which [he] liveth’. (According to a well-known tradition, probably apocryphal, a stupendous Jonson-Shakespeare-Drayton drinking session was the immediate cause of Shakespeare’s death. This is how Reverend John Ward recorded that piece of local gossip: ‘Shakespear, Drayton and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and itt seems drankd too hard, for Shakspear died of a feavour there contracted.’)
Alcohol. Piles of books and papers. A straw chair. Candles. This is all painting a dangerous picture. No surprise, then, that Jonson lost much of his library to fire. The conflagration occurred in the First Folio year, 1623. Suggesting that Shakespearean books and manuscripts are especially unlucky when it comes to documentary survival (a phenomenon that would, of course, help explain much of what the present book is about), none of Jonson’s Shakespeareana survived the fire. The full extent of the damage is unknown, but some of Jonson’s books did endure; today they bear singe-marks and other traces of inflammation. His The Works of Claudian (1585) is in the fire-anxious Bodleian; it features the telltale signs of scorching. Apart from marks of that kind, Jonson left behind underlinings, flower-doodles, his signature and extensive marginalia in his books.
Jonson provides the best model of what a Shakespearean ‘writer’s library’ might have been like. He is also the best candidate for the role of ‘master editor’ who lifted and magnified the Shakespearean canon and Shakespeare’s authorial legacy. If the First Folio is responsible for Shakespeare, and if Jonson was responsible for the First Folio, then in a real sense Jonson was responsible for the legend, and Jonson’s library is intertwined with Shakespeare’s.