It seems that nearly every second-hand bookshop in the English-speaking world has a dedicated Shakespeare section. And almost all the Shakespeare sections are the pits—the low points of their respective shops, to be jumped over when scanning the shelves. Odd volumes, silverfished, of Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Studies. Over-thumbed, marked-up school editions and cheat notes, covered in adhesive plastic. Cheap editions of the complete works, their microscopic printing completely unreadable. Study guides with pseudo-insights about Desdemona’s motivations and their implications for the people of today and everyday life. The average Shakespeare section is enough to make those people of today take their own everyday life.
Every now and then, though, there is treasure to be found on the Shakespeare shelves. And few treasures are better than the ‘private press’ Shakespeares, the best of which, typographically, put the First Folio to shame.
Dating from the seventeenth century, the term ‘private press’ is notoriously hard to define. John Carter, the man who jointly exposed the forgeries of Thomas Wise, left behind these useful words on ‘The fundamental principle of private press printing’:
the principle that, whether or not the press has to pay its way, the printer is more interested in making a good book than a fat profit. He prints what he likes, how he likes, not what someone else has paid him to print. If now and then he produces something more apt for looking at and handling than for the mundane purpose of reading, remember he is concerned as much with his own pleasure and education as with yours.
Started by Sir Egerton Brydges at Lee Priory near Canterbury in 1813, the Lee Priory Press was an early model for the modern private presses. According to private-press historian Roderick Cave, Brydges was ‘a strange figure with his Gothic-romantic melancholy, his fondness for picturesque solitude, and his interest in the books and literature of the past’. Archdeacon Francis Wrangham’s A Few Sonnets Attempted from Petrarch in Early Life (1817) was one of the press’s few unarguably successful books. Nevertheless, Brydges helped mark out a path toward private-press excellence. Another bibliophile who helped delineate that path was Sir Thomas Phillipps, the ogre who had the colossal run-in with Halliwell. He forayed into the private-press field with his ‘ill organised’ Middle Hill Press, which produced what Cambridge librarian Tim Munby called ‘mediocre’ books in very small print runs that still strained his printers. ‘Distress’d and disappointed’ (in the words of Phillipps’s agent), they worked in premises without running water, except for the flooding rain that poured though the broken windows.
In the late 1880s William Morris turned these and other antecedents into a veritable artistic movement. By that time, Morris had already established himself as an author, a designer, an entrepreneur, and the foremost advocate for authenticity in the arts and crafts. On 15 November 1888, his friend and neighbour Emery Walker delivered a lecture on printing at the first exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society. Using lantern slides that magnified type-specimens in a way that was as striking as it was useful, Walker took the audience through four centuries of good and bad typography. Oscar Wilde was in the audience; he afterwards praised the lecture effusively in the Pall Mall Gazette. Morris was also there, filled with inspiration. As he and Walker left the venue, Morris said, ‘Let’s make a new fount of type.’
Experiments with printing followed, one of which Morris called ‘the best-looking book issued since the seventeenth century...I am so pleased with my book...that I am any day seen huggling it up’. After further practice runs, Morris established his own printery, the Kelmscott Press, with Walker as a close adviser. Displaying a fastidious regard for all aspects of book making, Morris described his aim thus: ‘I began printing books with the hope of producing some which would have a definite claim to beauty, while at the same time they should be easy to read and should not dazzle the eye, or trouble the intellect of the reader by eccentricity of form in the letters.’ He designed his own typefaces and bindings and decorative borders, and commissioned other work from leading artists and designers and illustrators, most notably Edward Burne-Jones. Burne-Jones was instrumental in the production of the greatest achievement of the Kelmscott Press: the 1896 Chaucer. The ‘specials’ of that book, which were printed on vellum, cost 120 guineas and became some of the most sought-after books of all time.
Morris established for the private-press movement a sound ethic of good craftsmanship in progressive reaction to industrial printing and ersatz typography. He and his successors would strive to match the best printing with the best of literature; to translate the most sublime poetry and prose into the most sublime book designs. The men and women who joined the movement were kindred spirits to those who built Britain’s great private libraries: independent yet collaborative, eccentric yet rigorous, radical yet antiquarian in their interests. Roderick Cave described the Kelmscott books in terms that recall Francis Wrangham’s creeping, all-consuming erysipelas: ‘The books are heady, romantic, emotional typography; one almost feels that the type and ornament have grown together and could continue growing like some monstrous hothouse plant.’
The eleventh Kelmscott book was a beautiful edition of The Poems of William Shakespeare, printed from the original versions of Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece and the Sonnets. The elaborate border decoration of circling vines was carried over into beautiful, oversized initial letters, the whole printed in red and black, and bound in limp vellum. Five hundred copies were sold, at twenty-five shillings, plus ten vellum ‘specials’, price ten guineas. Today, the Poems volume is one of the rarest Kelmscott titles, very seldom seen on the market. The combination of Shakespeare and Kelmscott proved irresistible—people held on to the book. Shaw, though, sold his copy at the Sotheby’s auction of books with his additional notes. A highly desirable association copy—Morris had inscribed it to Shaw—the book realised only twenty pounds. Today, it would command a price well north of ten thousand dollars.
Shaw also sold his copy of The Tragedie of Hamlet Prince of Denmark, edited by J. Dover Wilson from the second quarto text (1604–05), illustrated by Edward Gordon Craig and published in Weimar by the Cranach Press (1930). Shaw was sorry to see it go: ‘Of all my Hamlets this is the most treasured. It is…a masterpiece of modern book design and printing, ranking my old friend Count Kessler and his Cranach Press with Morris and his Kelmscott Press and Acland with his Ashendene Press, as successors to Jenson and Caxton.’
A strong socialist strain runs through the private-press movement. The nature of fine printing, though, imposes an obvious paradox. Deluxe and fastidious printing necessitates small print runs and high prices. Morris was accused of ‘preaching socialism and going away to prepare books that none but the rich could buy’.
Born in Geneva in 1866, Charles de Sousy Ricketts was orphaned at the age of sixteen. In 1882, while studying wood engraving at the South London School of Technical Art, he met a fellow student, Charles Haslewood Shannon. The two Charleses formed a lifelong partnership in their work and in their private life. Both men became mainstays of the London art world. Shannon achieved success as a portraitist, an etcher and a lithographer. Ricketts excelled as a painter, designer, sculptor, critic and historian.
At their Chelsea home, the Vale, Ricketts and Shannon formed a superb art collection. In 1889 they launched The Dial, a journal of art and literature. When the first issue appeared, Oscar Wilde called at the Vale to beg its publishers not to produce another volume, because ‘all perfect things should be unique’. Thereafter, Ricketts designed and illustrated several Wilde books, including the superb first edition of The Sphinx (1894, small quarto, two hundred copies, printed in coloured inks, bound in gilt pictorial vellum, published by John Lane). Ricketts also produced, for the Magazine of Art, illustrations of two songs from The Tempest: ‘Where the Bee Sucks’ and ‘Ariel’s Song to Ferdinand’.
In 1896 the partners founded their own private press, which they called the Vale Press. This venture has been linked to the Arts and Crafts Movement, the Aesthetic Movement and Art Nouveau—but as much as anything it was inspired by book designs from the Italian Renaissance. Ricketts personally supervised the printing of Vale Press titles at a commercial printery, the Ballantyne Press. Like Morris, he designed his own typefaces, and paid close attention to every aspect of book making: paper, watermarks, binding designs, binding materials, texts, illustrations, typography. According to Thomas Sturge Moore, William Morris on his deathbed wept when he saw the first Vale Press productions.
The Vale Press produced some eighty-four titles, many of them with ‘specials’ printed on vellum, a deluxe material notoriously difficult to work with. The book that displayed the most ambition, and that most strained the partners, was the Vale Press edition of Shakespeare’s works. For this edition, the partners assembled a small but experienced team. Thomas Sturge Moore was appointed editor. He had already edited two Shakespearean texts published by Ricketts and Shannon: the piratical The Passionate Pilgrim (1896) and the Sonnets (1899). (The press also produced an edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese in 1897.) Moore’s assistant, Holmes, would read all the proofs.
The books were to be printed in the ‘Avon’ font, which Ricketts designed specifically for the Shakespeare edition. Thirty-seven volumes were planned (all the First Folio plays, plus Pericles). After pressure from subscribers, the publishers extended the edition to include two additional volumes: Shakespeare’s Poems and his Sonnets. The volumes were published at the cracking rate of one per month, from April 1900 to June 1903. Production was difficult. Not only was there the special font, but also a new scheme of Kelmscott-esque decorative floral borders engraved by C. E. Keates from Ricketts’ designs. Keates had produced similar borders for Morris. (Whereas the floral Kelmscott borders were vines ‘full of wine’, the Vale borders were ‘full of light’.) Each volume was individually designed and painstakingly checked. The plays had to be character perfect; the brass blocks and wood engravings had to integrate seamlessly with the text. The pace and the level of difficulty tested the Vale and Ballantyne teams to the limit. Eighteen months into the project, Moore described his work on the Vale Shakespeare as ‘rather a big order in the way of time’.
He recorded that work in his diary; his entries for Cymbeline provide an example of the steps taken for a single play. First, Moore prepared the text then sent it in manuscript to Ricketts, who read and approved it. A typewritten copy was then made, which Moore read, then sent to the printer, who used it to prepare the first set of proofs (‘proofs in slips’), which were taken from unpaged galley matter. These were then sent to Moore to read and correct. The text was then set in pages and the printer prepared another round of proofs (‘proofs in sheets’). Moore examined these and posted them to Holmes for final corrections. Ricketts, sometimes with assistance from Holmes, then supervised the final printing. In order to produce a play a month, these processes were run in parallel; at any given moment, each team member was working on multiple plays at different stages of production.
Hamlet was to be the first volume in the series. Its printed sheets were ready to be bound when, on 9 December 1899, a fire broke out at the Ballantyne Press. All the Hamlet sheets were destroyed, along with most of the Vale Press stock and decorative materials. This was a disaster for the edition and for the Vale Press as a whole. The reprinted Hamlet bore an additional press-mark—a burning Phoenix—and the motto ‘Valeo sed non vale dico’ (‘But I cannot say goodbye’). For the last volume of the series (Henry VIII) the motto was altered to ‘Valeo sed Vale dico’ (‘But I can say goodbye’).
Further troubles would follow. Printing difficulties with The Taming of the Shrew. Binding problems, too: the binders went on strike ‘over difficulties with the vellum copies’. The solution was to drop the idea of printing vellum specials for the Vale Shakespeare. The missing vellum copies are now an enduring fantasy for bibliophiles.
When the edition went on sale, it was greeted as an exquisite realisation of the playtexts and poems: a beautiful bookshelf of Shakespeare, in which, thanks to Ricketts’ deep involvement in the books’ every aspect, the contents harmonised seamlessly with the typeface, the decoration, the paper and the bindings. A total of 310 sets of the thirty-nine volumes were published. Despite the edition’s success, however, the loss of the Vale Press stock and materials in the fire was an unrecoverable setback. Ricketts and Shannon closed their press in 1904.
Ricketts turned to writing, painting and sculpture, and to designing for the theatre. His costumes for Lear and Macbeth won wide acclaim, as did his books Titian (1910) and Pages on Art (1913). Fervently opposed to modernism, Ricketts ‘had a great reputation as a connoisseur and in 1915 turned down the offer of the directorship of the National Gallery’.
In 1929 Shannon fell from a ladder while hanging a picture. Brain damage and amnesia were the result; Shannon required intensive nursing, and his career came to a tragic end. Devastated and exhausted, Ricketts suffered a fatal heart attack just two years after the accident. Shannon died in 1937, bequeathing most of the Ricketts–Shannon art collection to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
The paper and bindings of the Vale Shakespeare volumes are remarkably robust (the cloth used for the bindings was heavily infused with book glue) and they have stayed, for the most part, in very good condition. Though a ‘rare’ private-press edition, the Vale Shakespeare serves as a curious demonstration of the mathematics of rarity. An edition of 310 copies of thirty-nine volumes equates to a total print run of more than twelve thousand books! While complete sets of the Vale Shakespeare may be rare, individual volumes are common, and are frequently misfiled in bookshops. In my student days, Vale Shakespeare volumes were easy to come by at twenty to thirty dollars, despite being worth ten times that; the same thousand-per-cent margin that Wise forgeries attracted.
Other desirable Shakespearean private-press books that can be found without much difficulty include the Golden Cockerel Press edition of Twelfth Night, and the Nonesuch Press edition of Shakespeare versus Shallow—Leslie Hotson’s remarkable book about William Gardiner, the corrupt Justice of the Peace who feuded with Francis Langley, owner of the Swan theatre, and who was behind the writ issued against Shakespeare. To solve the private-press paradox, Francis Meynell’s Nonesuch produced both deluxe limited editions and ‘trade’ or ‘unlimited’ editions that adopted the same or similar typography but used industrial production methods such as offset printing. A socialist like Morris, Meynell planned to print an unlimited edition of Shakespeare—to bring a well-designed edition of the plays and poems to a mass audience—but the Great Depression made the project impossible.
Nonesuch published Charles Ricketts’ final book, a poignant remembrance of Oscar Wilde. Late in his life, Ricketts had worried that his Vale Press typefaces could be used by others in a ‘stale’ and ‘unthinking’ manner. His solution was to do with his type equipment—all his letter punches and matrices—what Allen Lane had done with his autograph book: consign it to the Thames.
Allen Lane had moved from Bristol to London in 1919. Through a random act of serendipitous nepotism, his distant uncle, the great publisher John Lane, brought him into The Bodley Head as an apprentice. John Lane died in 1925, but Allen continued on at the firm. With the support of Lane’s widow, Annie, Allen was made a director. His brothers, Richard Lane (who had worked as a Shakespearean actor in Egypt) and John Lane junior, would later join him at the firm. But in 1926 they had not yet arrived and there was no one at The Bodley Head to curb Allen’s reckless approach to publishing. Without a minder, Allen was an accident waiting to happen.
The accident did indeed arrive, in the form of actor and author Hesketh Pearson, who presented The Bodley Head with a remarkable manuscript: The Whispering Gallery: Being Leaves from a Diplomat’s Diary. Purportedly an anonymous tell-all memoir by a leading British diplomat, the manuscript consisted of jaunty and implausible anecdotes about world leaders—such as Kaiser Wilhelm, Cecil Rhodes and Mussolini—and literary lions—such as Kipling, Shaw and Twain. An example is the following story of a private audience with the Kaiser at Potsdam:
[Wilhelm] was in one of his light-hearted humorous moods and tried to prove that Shakespeare was a German, the chief evidence that he could bring being that no German is introduced into any of the plays! When I informed him that the same sort of evidence proved conclusively that Homer was an Englishman, he laughed and said: ‘You can have him! It doesn’t matter much.’
Allen was eager to add the book to The Bodley Head’s list. The firm’s board agreed to go ahead on one condition: Pearson would have to tell one of their number the identity of the author. The board chose Allen, and Pearson named the diplomat and classicist, Sir Rennell Rodd. Allen quickly checked Who’s Who; some of the details lined up, and he gave an assurance to his fellow directors, who authorised a large print-run. When the book appeared, Rodd furiously disowned it. Forced to withdraw it from sale, The Bodley Head sued Pearson for fraud.
Publicly, Allen Lane pretended to be Pearson’s dupe, but privately he probably knew from the beginning that the book was a hoax. Pearson had already produced other fanciful writings, including Modern Men and Mummers, ‘replete with exaggerated and often libellous tales of theatrical folk’, and, in Adelphi Magazine, ‘a collection of entirely imaginary conversations between Bernard Shaw and G. K. Chesterton which were (and still are) widely regarded as authentic’. (The Whispering Gallery, too, is sometimes taken seriously.)
After the fraud’s exposure, Pearson was temporarily untouchable as an author, but Allen Lane (uncharacteristically) refused to bear a grudge. He even aided Pearson’s resurrection as a legitimate author and Shakespeare biographer. Many years later, Lane told a retired army officer, ‘there is no question that Hesketh Pearson did write the book himself, and I must say that despite the fact that the book got us into a great deal of hot water, I always had a high regard for him’.
Beset by such calamitous failures, The Bodley Head was soon in terminal financial trouble. Allen, Richard and John set up Penguin Books as part of their Bodley exit strategy. The goals were ambitious: the Lane brothers would bring the typographical care of fine printing to low-cost, mass-market paperbacks.
Inadvertently, the Vale Press had taken a stylish Shakespeare to a mass-ish market. Penguin would do it on purpose, and on an enormous scale. The Penguin Shakespeare—a Shakespeare library in pocket-sized volumes—was one of the firm’s first series. Just two years after Penguin began, the Lane brothers launched their debut tranche of six plays. Edward Young, who designed the first Penguin logo, produced the Penguin Shakespeare cover design. It featured a wood engraving by the private-press publisher, author and designer Robert Gibbings. The books were well received, both critically and commercially. The Sunday Times reviewer wrote: ‘Shakespeare for sixpence is well enough but this is Shakespeare well edited and well produced; books as bright as new pins, planned with care.’
The Vale Shakespeares were produced in just over four years; Penguin’s took longer. The series editor, George Harrison from the University of London, was Allen’s second choice for the role, but he went on to edit the Penguin Shakespeare for another twenty-two years. Over that period, one and a half million volumes were sold. Penguin took Shakespeare to an audience never imagined by the First Folio editors. (Like the Folio, though, the Penguins were not without glitches. Two examples: ‘prostate’ for ‘prostrate’; and ‘Queer Elizabeth I’.)
Apart from all the canonical plays and poems, Penguin published Life in Shakespeare’s England (1944), Principles of Shakespearean Production (1949), The Age of Shakespeare (1955), Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies (1960), The Life of Shakespeare (1963), Shakespeare: A Celebration (1964), Shakespeare’s Plutarch (1964), Shakespeare’s Plays in Performance (1969) and scores of other orthodox and unorthodox titles. Penguin New Writing, number twenty-five, criticised John Gielgud’s Hamlet and put a powerful case for preserving the bawdiness and ribaldry in Shakespeare’s plays, which dancer, theatre director and distant Shakespeare relative Rupert Doone saw as crucial to their coherence. Penguin’s Dr Johnson on Shakespeare included helpful Johnsonian notes on Shakespeare’s art. Johnson was not far away from Pope, or even the Bowdlers, in his views on the raw parts of Shakespeare: ‘There are many passages mean, childish, and vulgar; and some which ought not to have been exhibited, as we are told they were, to a maiden Queen.’
In 1942, when Richard and John were serving in the Navy, Allen Lane issued a Penguin edition of Hesketh Pearson’s Life of Shakespeare. Containing a staunch defence of Shakespeare’s heterosexuality, the book marked Pearson’s revival in the Penguin pantheon, nearly two decades after the Whispering Gallery affair. Looking back over Penguin’s accomplishments since 1935, it is clear that no publisher did more to disseminate Shakespeare’s work. No publisher did more to create a modern Shakespeare library.