Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée

Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes

Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes

Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée

Zachary Lesser

PUBLISHED IN COOPERATION WITH

FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lesser, Zachary, author.

Title: Ghosts, holes, rips and scrapes : Shakespeare in 1619, bibliography in the longue durée / Zachary Lesser.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2021] | Published in cooperation with Folger Shakespeare Library. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020032184 | ISBN 978-0-8122-5294-1 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Criticism, Textual. | Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Bibliography—Quartos.

Classification: LCC PR3071 .L47 2021 | DDC 822.3/3—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032184

For Rafa, who tolerated my selfies from all those libraries

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1. Ghosts

Chapter 2. Holes

Chapter 3. Rips and Scrapes

Conclusion. Questions

Appendix A. Census of Known Sets of the 1619 Quartos

Appendix B. Order of Plays in Known Bindings of the 1619 Quartos

Appendix C. Copies Consulted

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

From its beginnings in dialogue between A. W. Pollard and W. W. Greg, bibliography of the Pavier Quartos has been a collective endeavor. This book is the outcome of discussions with numerous colleagues. For those to whom I am most indebted, I fear it may have seemed an endless conversation. In particular, I need to thank Peter Stallybrass. In 2013 we taught a graduate course together, which led to a co-written essay partly on the Pavier Quartos: Shakespeare between Pamphlet and Book, in Shakespeare and Textual Studies, ed. M. J. Kidnie and Sonia Massai (Cambridge University Press, 2015), 105–33. A section of that essay is incorporated in revised form in the pages that follow, and I am grateful not only for Peter’s generosity in letting me include it here, but also for his ongoing collaborative curiosity about the Pavier Quartos and many, many other subjects. More than anyone else, Aaron Pratt of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas and Jay Moschella of the Boston Public Library have talked through innumerable mysteries about these quartos with me over the past few years, and I have been as inspired by their shared excitement as I have been enlightened by their expertise. Erin Blake, Claire Bourne, Alan Farmer, Mitch Fraas, Ian Gadd, Adam Hooks, Kathryn James, David Kastan, Ivan Lupic, John Pollack, Tara Lyons, Will Noel, Sarah Reidell, Tony Russ, Adam Smyth, Tiffany Stern, Whitney Trettien, Heather Wolfe, and Henry Woudhuysen also spent time thinking about these playbooks with me over the years and made a number of crucial suggestions that have furthered my research.

It is impossible to undertake a comprehensive study of the extant copies of ten playbooks that survive in hundreds of copies without a great deal of assistance. I have been fortunate that the curators of the special collections that I have not been able to visit personally have been so helpful and learned: John Ball (Akron), Rebecca Baumann and Madeline Keysey (Indiana), Adam Doskey (Illinois), Eric Johnson (Ohio State), Robert MacLean (Glasgow), and Georgia Prince (Auckland). Many other librarians have answered further questions when they arose, as they inevitably do, after I had visited, or have examined other books in their collection for me: Lucy Angus (Birmingham), Karen Attar (Senate House), Erin Blake (Folger), Julie Christenson (Texas Christian), Emily Dourish (Cambridge), Christina Duffy (British Library), Elizabeth Dunn (Duke), Jill Gage (Newberry), Sarah Horowitz (Haverford), Kathryn James (Beinecke), Tanya Kirk (British Library), James Mitchell (National Library of Scotland), John Overholt (Houghton), Phil Palmer (Clark, UCLA), Sandy Paul (Trinity College, Cambridge), Susan Swain (Texas Christian), Stephen Tabor (Huntington), Kyle Triplett (New York Public), Abbie Weinberg (Folger), and Heather Wolfe (Folger). Molly Schwartzburg at Virginia offered very helpful comments on the lost volume once owned by Thomas Randolph, and Kathryn James helped me to understand Henrietta Bartlett’s censuses better. Numerous scholars have checked features of books for me, both the 1619 quartos and others, including Adam Barker, Liza Blake, Heidi Brayman, Megan Cook, Sophie Coulombeau, Megan Heffernan, Eve Houghton, Roberta Klimt, Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich, Thomas Luxon, Erin McCarthy, Ellen McKay, Molly Murray, Duncan Salkeld, Paul Salzman, and Adam Zucker.

My work developed through a series of lectures, where I received many thoughtful critiques and suggestions, including from Erika Boeckeler, Emma Depledge, Lukas Erne, John Jowett, Marina Leslie, Laurie Maguire, Jim Marino, Sonia Massai, Elizabeth Ott, Kristen Poole, Richard Proudfoot, Ben Robinson, Will Sharpe, Emma Smith, Dan Traister, Bart van Es, and Julian Yates.

Alan Farmer, Ben Higgins, Kathleen Lynch, Aaron Pratt, Taije Silverman, Adam Smyth, and Peter Stallybrass each read the entire manuscript in detail and improved it immensely, as did an anonymous reader for the press. The book is much better thanks to the expert editorial guidance of Jerry Singerman, who made smart suggestions all along the way.

Ghost, Holes, Rips and Scrapes was written while I was a visiting professor in the Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature, e Culture Moderne at the University of Bologna, and I remain grateful to the department, and particularly to Keir Elam, for making my time there so enjoyable and productive.

Introduction

Nothing, I think, but the hypnotic influence that traditionally accepted facts exercise even over the most critical mind can have prevented Mr. Pollard from suspecting that the ten quartos in question were not merely collected and published in one composite volume in 1619, but that, whatever the dates that appear on the title-pages, the whole set was actually printed by one printer at that one date.

—W. W. Greg, On Certain False Dates in Shakespearian Quartos

Our modern understanding of Shakespeare as an author, of what he wrote and how, depends on the development in the early twentieth century of a new way of looking at books. And our modern understanding of printed books as physical objects containing clues to their own process of production—the scholarly discipline of bibliography—would look very different without Shakespeare. At the foundation of this intersection is a narrative of detection and discovery: traditionally accepted facts are overturned by a revolutionary hypothesis, and the hypnotic influence of old ways of thinking is pierced by the critical mind informed by bibliographic knowledge.¹

This foundational moment came in 1908, with W. W. Greg’s modestly entitled essay On Certain False Dates in Shakespearian Quartos. Greg’s friendly critique of A. W. Pollard’s inability to see beyond traditionally accepted facts, and the more revolutionary hypothesis that Greg advanced instead, were central to establishing what came to be called, in a typically modernist formulation, the New Bibliography.² This approach to Shakespeare’s texts reigned for much of the twentieth century, but over the past several decades scholars have engaged in a sustained critique of its methods, ideology, and unexamined assumptions. Even as we have sought our own revolutionary hypotheses, however, the hypnotic influence of traditionally accepted facts has been as hard for us to escape as it was for Pollard. In trying to overturn the arguments of the New Bibliographers, moreover, we have often relied on the very evidence they provided us, imposing our own beliefs—which therefore remain, in important if unseen ways, their beliefs—on what we see in Shakespeare’s books.

This book is an extended case study, with I hope broad implications, of one of the most important books in the history of Shakespeare studies. Not the First Folio, which has been analyzed more intensely and celebrated more devotionally than any other book printed in early modern England. Rather, the book that started Pollard and Greg on their quests to uncover the truth hiding behind traditionally accepted facts was an ordinary-looking quarto volume that Pollard first saw in 1902 (Figure 0.1).³ It bound together ten plays, or nine playbooks (since one of them is made up of two plays), all in some way connected to Shakespeare. Three of these plays are linked by continuous signatures, the printer’s pagination system: The Whole Contention betweene the two Famous Houses, Lancaster and Yorke (which comprises versions of the second and third parts of Henry VI) and Pericles. All the other plays in the group have their own run of signatures: A Yorkshire Tragedy, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, Henry V, Sir John Oldcastle, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.⁴ While Yorkshire Tragedy and Oldcastle are not now considered Shakespearean, they both have Shakespeare’s name on the title page, although Henry V, like all the other early quartos of that play, does not.⁵ Pericles, Yorkshire Tragedy, and Merry Wives are dated 1619; but Whole Contention is undated, and the other five plays are dated either 1600 or 1608. Five of the playbooks list T. P. as the publisher—the initials belong to Thomas Pavier—but the others have various names in the imprints (Table 0.1). The whole volume is bound in simple brown calfskin, and the name of the early seventeenth-century lawyer and book collector Edward Gwynn is tooled in gold on the front cover. The volume is now in the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the story of its journey there shows the power of the revolutionary hypothesis that Greg told about it.

In July 1919, the great Philadelphia book dealer A. S. W. Rosenbach burst into the offices of the Standard Oil Company of New York with a message for its president, Henry Clay Folger. Rosenbach had finally succeeded in acquiring the Gwynn volume from the Rhode Island collector Marsden Perry. Folger immediately bought the book for the staggering price of fifty thousand dollars, more than he ever paid for a book, with the exception of two of his copies of the First Folio.⁶ Only eight years earlier, Henry Huntington had paid this same amount for a Gutenberg Bible, said at the time to have set the sales record for a single volume.⁷ The price of the Gwynn volume is even more surprising when we realize not only that these are all later editions, not firsts, but also that numerous copies of each of the quartos bound in the volume still survive, far more than is typical for Shakespeare editions. To understand why Folger wanted the book so badly and was willing to pay so much for it, we need to trace its provenance.

Figure 0.1 Edward Gwynn’s set of Pavier Quartos. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 26101 copy 3.

The most obvious sign of previous ownership is Edward Gwynn’s stamp on the cover.⁸ The Gwynn name, with the guarantee it brings that the binding is roughly contemporary with Shakespeare, is crucial to the story. But the twentieth-century provenance is just as important. Pollard recounts that the book was brought to him in his capacity as a member of the Department of Printed Books at the British Museum: Some years ago a letter was received at the British Museum from a German gentleman stating that he was bringing over to England, with some other early books, a volume containing nine Shakespearian (or pseudo-Shakespearian) plays, which he had been advised in Germany were of considerable value. He offered the British Museum the refusal of any that it might want, and stated that he proposed to bring the volume to the Museum immediately on his arrival at Charing Cross, probably about 6 p.m.⁹ This German gentleman must have been a member of the aristocratic Goertz-Wrisberg family, or one of their agents, since a bookplate on the front pastedown belongs to their library; the effects of the book’s sojourn in Germany can also be seen on the spine, where a macaronic label was added that reads: Plays und pamphlets of W Shak-speare.¹⁰

Pollard’s institution declined to purchase the volume because all these plays were already in the British Museum, although Pollard himself was already impressed by the book, which was in such admirable condition and generally such an attractive purchase that some pains were taken, but unavailingly, to find it an English home.¹¹ The relative lack of interest is telling: at this moment the book must have appeared fairly familiar to collectors, resembling numerous other assemblages of Shakespeare quartos still to be found at reasonable prices, and the plays it contained were among the most common on the market. Purchased by the Quaritch bookselling firm in August 1902, the book was sold two months later to Perry. Pollard seems to have given little further thought to the charming fat little volume until 1906, when he saw a book that reminded him of Gwynn’s. While arranging a Shakespeare exhibition in the King’s Library at the British Museum, Pollard had a chance conversation with a visitor, which led him to another volume of the same plays, although in a different order, in a mid-eighteenth-century binding.¹²

In fact, this encounter was hardly chance: the owner of the book, Edward Hussey, had noted the recent rise in sales prices for Shakespeare quartos and decided the time was right to sell the volume that had been in his family’s library since at least the mid-1700s. Hussey’s copy may originally have been owned by the minister and bureaucrat William Neile (1560–1624), who signed the title page of Whole Contention, the first play in the book.¹³ Perhaps it was Neile who, upon acquiring the volume, also added 1622 in manuscript after the dateless imprint of Whole Contention; the numerals appear to be in an early hand, and the ink appears similar to that used in Neile’s signature, although since both were later bleached, it is hard to be sure. Hussey consulted with the Society of Antiquaries about the book, and on the advice of someone there, took the book to the British Museum and hunted up Mr Pollard.

Hussey recounts that Pollard was much impressed by it, declaring it a very creamy little volume and estimating that the price of it would suffice to buy a house with. Following this consultation, Hussey decided to auction the volume at Sotheby’s, where each play was pulled out of the binding for individual sale. A few days afterwards, he continues, he received a letter from Mr Pollard requesting me if possible to delay breaking up the volume, as he had an interesting and ingenious theory connected with it.¹⁴ Unfortunately, it was too late: the plays had already been prepared for auction. The market for rare books had destroyed this interesting volume, since they were worth more individually than together. Only the binding survives, still at the Hussey estate at Scotney Castle and now containing Hussey’s own manuscript account of the story. The whereabouts of four of the nine playbooks once included cannot now be traced.¹⁵ As Pollard wrote, while it may be to the advantage of every seller to break up the old volume, the contents, once dispersed, may easily lose all power of telling their collective history.¹⁶

Not quite all their power: it was this brief encounter with Hussey’s book before its dispersal that led Pollard to his hypothesis about the Gwynn volume. Pollard believed that both volumes were made up of remaindered copies, hastily put together in 1622 when the news of the forthcoming folio of 1623 caused them to be thrown on the market. Four of the five plays with dates earlier than 1619, Pollard noted, had been the second of two editions printed in the same year, and every publisher knows by sad experience that a first edition of a book may be exhausted so rapidly that to refuse to print a second seems a mere turning away good money, and yet when the second is printed only a few copies are sold, and the remaining copies become at once dead stock. Bundling them together might create a fresh market for these old wares. Obviously Thomas Pavier was the prime mover in this device, Pollard wrote, as most of the editions were his.¹⁷ Seeing an opportunity to unload some copies when news of the First Folio surfaced, Pavier quickly tried to salvage what he could of his investments by packaging them as a nonce volume, a collection of previously printed texts.

Pollard seems initially to have thought that the Gwynn volume was simply a sammelband, an assemblage of individual pamphlets bound up by a reader at some time after their initial sale. Readers commonly did this, because it was not worth binding a single play, but leaving plays unbound increased wear and tear (Figure 0.2).¹⁸ But once Pollard had seen Hussey’s volume, he rejected this hypothesis: The chances that two collectors, without any determining cause, had bound together precisely the same editions of these plays, without the admixture of any others, seemed very remote.¹⁹ And he knew from Greg’s catalogue of the collection of Edward Capell at Trinity College, Cambridge, where Greg was the librarian, that the very same plays were present there in two eighteenth-century bindings (Figure 0.3). Finally, under Pollard’s own care at the British Museum was the former collection of David Garrick, which contained the same plays individually bound but of such a uniform size that Pollard could identify them without even looking for the titles on their backs, easily pick[ing] out all nine plays from among their fellows simply by their height.²⁰ Pollard thought it impossible that these same plays had coincidentally been gathered by different readers into the two volumes he had seen, along with the Capell and Garrick volumes he inferred had once existed.

Figure 0.2 A reader’s sammelband of drama, probably assembled by the Edward Palmer who signed all but one of the title pages; the table of contents on the front cover is likely later. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Ih Sh24 607fc.

Ironically, Pollard thought, Capell himself had likely contributed to the destruction of other bound volumes of these plays by drawing so much attention to the editorial value of Shakespeare quartos in his 1768 edition of Mr. William Shakespeare, his Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, set out by himself in quarto, or by the Players his Fellows in folio: It cannot be doubted that this (undue) exaltation of the quartos as set out by Shakespeare himself powerfully directed attention to them, and would cause copies to be searched for. And then the antiquarian market would destroy more evidence: As soon as a volume containing nine plays was found, the tendency, as we have noted, would be to break it up.²¹ Pollard perceived from the outset that to understand this odd bibliographic case we need to consider the full lifetimes of these books across the centuries, as they interact with readers, editors, collectors, librarians, bookbinders, auction houses, and scholars.

Figure 0.3 Edward Capell’s two volumes of Pavier Quartos. By permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, Capell Q.ii and Q.12.

For Pollard, that plays of Shakespeare should have remained unsold for nineteen years or more and then have been worked off in a made-up volume, in the company of others wrongly assigned to him, offered some consolation for the ‘Remaindered’ among contemporary authors. When they saw their precious works offered in second-hand catalogues for a small fraction of their original price, they could remember the similar fate of the works of their illustrious predecessor.²² Pollard concluded on this note of historical irony: that the greatest of English writers should have been remaindered like anyone else showed the fickleness of the book-buying public.

Greg soon turned this explanation on its head. With the new tools of analytic