Bound to Read - Jeffrey Todd Knight Material Texts

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in the flyleaves: “I purchased the contents of this volume June 1796 of an obscure bookseller of the name of Vanderberg near St. Margaret’s Church Westminster. He had cut them with Several others out of a Volume, put each of them separately into blue paper, and priced them at 4s 5d.”

      Rare books most often appear to us today as material artifacts without material histories.3 Aside from the occasional binder’s or conservator’s note, there are few reasons to suspect that the generally uniform, modern-looking texts we consult in special-collections libraries have ever existed in other configurations—that ways of using and assigning value to them have ever been different from our own. But Caldecott’s Shakespeare shows evidence of at least three modes of readerly engagement, not a single overarching one. First, working backward, there is that of its current owner, Oxford University, which values the book’s early imprints and relatively unspoiled condition and which protects it using a special classification number and a curatorial policy granting readers only the most limited access in highly controlled environments. Second, there is that of Vanderberg and Caldecott, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century owners respectively, who valued the texts as collectors’ items and who had no reservation about physically restructuring them to maximize profit (in the case of the former) or prestige (in the case of the latter). Third, and more distantly, there is whatever early modern compilation these items might have inhabited before they were cut into individual units and anthologized in a morocco-bound volume in 1796. At each of these historical junctures, questions arise about the influence of archival practices over our perceptions of literary artifacts. How does the administration of texts for careful scholarly use in today’s libraries conceal the work of earlier readers and collectors, who were sometimes more likely to reshape books according to their own desires than to venerate them as reservoirs of literary content, frozen in time? More gravely perhaps, how did the work of earlier collectors—in wresting texts from their contexts, in building volumes of one author’s collected verse—conceal even earlier forms of textual organization that may have seemed to them unprofitable, distasteful, or not worth saving?

      Chapter 1 raised these questions through case studies of compiling and disbinding activities at two key early libraries. This chapter moves outward to consider textual (re)assembly across multiple institutions and early collectors, focusing on a single figure: Shakespeare. Using a range of archival specimens that, like Caldecott’s volume, preserve evidence of their being engineered and organized by successive owners, but which have long been of interest only to bibliographers, I argue that the parameters of reading and interpretation are frequently established and sometimes imposed by the collectors, compilers, conservators, and curators who in a very literal sense make books. For each new set of attitudes concerning the order of texts in books and libraries, an earlier set of attitudes is partially concealed, preventing certain reader-text interactions and enabling a host of others. As the specimens I examined in my first chapter have begun to suggest, the problem is acute in the case of early printed texts, which were assembled, organized, and read in ways that are foreign to us today. Before they were extracted into individual units and clothed in decorated covers, many such texts—particularly small-format literary works—existed in composite volumes, user- and retailer-initiated anthologies, topical arrangements of disparate authors or genres, evoking complex histories of early book production and reception. But such texts are only ever available to us now through the mediations of readers and owners who suppress those histories—who (perhaps inevitably) remake what they acquire according to their own historically situated notion of the book. This chapter affirms that these processes of making and remaking books play a critical role in generating meaning, establishing links between works in the same binding, which may be read or ignored, or dissolving such links so that works can stand alone. Moving from the familiar, individuated Shakespearean texts most often found in libraries today to the radically unfamiliar assemblages of early print culture, I propose that we can ground historical interpretations—and discover new ones—in the largely reader-driven, recombinant productions of Renaissance writers’ first audiences.

      Making Shakespeare in Modernity

      Shakespeare has long been a primary point of reference in modern bibliographical scholarship in English. As the scientific New Bibliography gave way to a more reflexive textual criticism in the late twentieth century, attention shifted decisively from the ideals of eclectic editing to the varied representational machinery through which texts and canons are transmitted in time.4 Following D. F. McKenzie’s influential dictum, “forms effect meaning,” critics interested in the materiality of texts have worked for two decades or more to show that print apparatuses—from early paratexts to modern classroom editions—are implicated in literary strategies and historical patterns of reception.5 But as I have been arguing, while the compositors, vendors, and editors of Shakespearean texts have been revealed as important agents in meaningmaking, those most directly responsible for the configuration and classification of texts by Shakespeare are not often discussed. We saw in the last chapter that binding, curatorship, and conservation—like other aspects of textual presentation—produce rather than simply make available literary works to be read. As with editing (or perhaps more fundamentally than with editing), collecting practices circumscribe interpretive possibilities within a recognizable, physical text. And also as with editing, these practices are inexorably subjective: the resulting text does not transparently re-present a literary work that exists, fully formed, in advance; it impresses into the historical substructure of that work the values, assumptions, and biases of those who make it, at each stage of its construction.

      McKenzie’s analysis of the early modern printing house dispensed with “the erroneous assumption that a book was normally put into production as an independent unit.”6 Works were printed in parts, frequently across multiple presses, and put together in nonuniform ways that vex attempts to describe a standardized practice. On the consumption end of early book culture, however, the primacy of the independent unit of reading and interpretation is more often than not upheld. Modern collectors standardized early printed texts of great value as a matter of conservation, and in each multibook volume like Caldecott’s Shakespeare, broken up and rebound in individual units in modernity, taxonomies of text, work, and author from the modern period were made to organize the reception of premodern literature. In the earliest domain of printed literary materials in English, the works of the later Middle Ages, scholars have made much of the “clusters of literary writing” discovered in Sammelbände, the “fluid canonicity” reminiscent of the manuscript miscellany that seems to have been generated in everyday acts of anthologization by readers and printers.7 Yet by the time we reach the age of Shakespeare in archives, we find books and collections that are seemingly indistinguishable from modern ones—that is, neat rows of independent, leather-bound plays and books of poetry. In nearly every case, as we will see, the bindings, labels, and catalog identifiers are products of the last two centuries.

      The works of the English Renaissance, in fact, offer a particularly promising field of primary materials within which to pose the question of how early books were made (or unmade) in this way. As common sense suggests, the likelihood that a text has undergone modernizing structural renovations such as those sketched out in the last chapter is directly proportionate to how valuable it was in the eyes of modern owners and collectors. Texts now considered literary, therefore, often reach us as the most heavily processed of all early printed materials, a fact obvious to researchers of the period’s lowerprestige, nonliterary books, which are far more frequently found in original bindings and seemingly unkempt Sammelbände. Within that literary subset, the dramatic works by Shakespeare—which Thomas Bodley famously ranked among the “riffe-raffes” and “baggage books” to be excluded from his library8—were eventually of the utmost value and thus subject to all forms of bibliographical intervention that may have come into fashion. As a result, the surviving archive of Shakespearean texts has a particularly varied morphology, though it is one that has been oversimplified, or suppressed, by modern collecting practices.

      A representative example is the sole copy of the “sixth quarto” of Pericles (1635) now held at the British Library.9 Like many extant Shakespearean plays, the text is trimly bound in luxury leather as it might have adorned a gentleman’s shelf in the nineteenth century, though this was not the

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