Bound to Read - Jeffrey Todd Knight Material Texts

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Garrick, the actor and playwright, at his death in 1779. It owes its neat, modern appearance to the British Museum bindery, where the book was given new covers (tooled in gold with Garrick’s coat of arms) in the century after its donation. Though the library’s integrated catalog lists the text as an individual item—with no notes in the entry suggesting anything to the contrary—earlier catalogs from Garrick’s collection give us a different picture.11 Before it was rebound in the nineteenth century, Pericles was one part of a larger compilation, and this volume, left mostly intact, retains an eighteenth-century table of contents originally written in the flyleaves that confirms the arrangement of texts in Garrick’s time (Fig. 9).12 To say the least, these texts are strange bedfellows: a morality play, Conflict of Conscience (1581); an interlude called New Custome (1573); the sometime Shakespearean history play Edward the Third (1599); John Marston’s tragedy Antonio’s Revenge (1602); Pericles; the early tragedy Gorboduc (1590); and the comedy Albumazar (1634). The grouping is not arbitrary, though it may seem so to us. Garrick was an avid collector who assembled a wide-ranging library of dramatic texts, most of them in composite volumes, for his own use and others’.13 This volume, one of the few to survive the nineteenth-century rebinding campaigns at the British Museum,14 bears the traces of its shifting shapes and uses. The contents list indicates that Garrick at one point moved Albumazar to another volume (likely as he adapted it for the stage).15 Moreover, a second contents list (Fig. 10), written on the leaf preceding Gorboduc,16 indicates that this composite book has origins in an even earlier composite volume whose texts seem to have been reshaped and redistributed throughout Garrick’s collection as they were acquired. The earlier hand is that of the seventeenth-century collector and former owner Richard Smith,17 and the superseded arrangement of texts is even more peculiar: sixteenth-century interludes mixed with Stuart masques and Restoration comedies; works from authors as diverse as John Bale, Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and Matthew Medbourne.18 These composite books stand in stark contrast to the slim, modern-looking Pericles, whose status relative to the other texts is now encoded in its fine binding. That it once formed part of an eighteenth-century assemblage of texts, which itself once formed part of a seventeenth-century assemblage of texts, is made all but imperceptible by an imposed nineteenth-century notion of its fixity, autonomy, and canonicity.

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      For generations of collectors and owners whose legacy is still visible in archives, the relatively flexible composite volume was the most conventional, practical means of storing and using most kinds of literary texts. Sammelbände, binding experts and rare-book curators tell us, were staples of early book culture.19 But as artifacts of literary history—artifacts conveying a range of possibilities for intertextual reading and canon formation that are perhaps not obvious to us today—these composite volumes have not been closely examined by critics. One reason for this neglect is a tendency to see intellectual activities independently of knowledge organization, considered merely practical—a tendency that is especially evident in a figure like Garrick, whose revivals and adaptations have long proven resonant in modern interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays, but whose methods of reading and organizing the texts that presumably facilitated those revivals and adaptations have hardly been explored at all. The most fundamental reason for this neglect, however, is clear in the fate of Garrick’s copy of Pericles: despite the ubiquity of composite volumes in the handpress era, Shakespeare’s books are rarely found today in these configurations. In the modern era, the most prestigious literary works—the works that attract the most critical attention—were systematically extracted, decontextualized, and clothed anew in material configurations that reflect little history of ownership or use. Where a Shakespearean text can be found in an undisturbed composite volume, it is most often one of the apocryphal or otherwise noncanonical texts. At St. John’s College, Cambridge, for example, there is a mid-seventeenth-century volume combining eight books of controversial religious and political prose with a copy of The Birth of Merlin (1662), a play attributed to Shakespeare and Rowley (Fig. 11).20 St. John’s College, Oxford, preserves a similar example: a collection from the eighteenth century (with an original handwritten table of contents) bringing together a diverse array of plays, masques, and pageants, including the 1662 Birth of Merlin text and the second quarto of The Merry Devil of Edmonton (1612), a play also attributed on its title page to Shakespeare.21 In fact, a cursory survey of the extant copies of these two noncanonical plays at the British Library, Oxford, and Cambridge shows that over half occur in composite configurations. Plays with less dubious canonicity almost never occur in composites.22 The implication is something of a bibliographic corollary to the point made some time ago by Stephen Orgel: the “authentic Shakespeare” is often one that is furthest removed (in this case, literally) from its early contexts of reception and circulation.23

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      Thomas Caldecott’s collected volume is thus both symptomatic and anomalous in modern economies of book curatorship and archiving: symptomatic in that its highly valuable texts were extracted from a larger, earlier book and placed into individual units (by Vanderberg), anomalous in that the volume has survived this long in its present composite state (engineered by Caldecott). Given the taxonomic pressures evidently placed on such multitext volumes over time, the book’s longevity is most likely attributable to the fact that its constituent texts share the same author and genre—criteria that, I demonstrated in Chapter 1, square easily with modern habits of textual organization, precluding at least in part the need for reconfiguration in a later library. Many like it, as the volumes in David Garrick’s collection attest, were more readily separated. An instructive example can be found in one of Garrick’s contemporaries, William Hunter, whose collection is now housed at the Glasgow University Library.24 Hunter, an anatomist and celebrated book collector, acquired a number of early modern literary texts at auction in his time, and as his surviving manuscript catalog indicates, the majority of these were formerly in composite configurations.25 Figure 12 shows the typical appearance of a composite volume from the Hunterian collection today: once made up of many texts, it has been split into individual units, each unit uniformly rebound in twentieth-century calf. Of the volumes containing Hunter’s early editions of Shakespeare’s works, all were reshaped in this way except one.26 Among them was a collection of thirteen Elizabethan and Jacobean texts comprising masques, entertainments, two comedies by Ben Jonson, and a number of history plays, including quartos of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, parts 1 and 2.27 Another volume formerly combined works by Philip Massinger, John Ford, Thomas Middleton, and others with the sixth quarto of Shakespeare’s Richard II (1634).28 Still another, which seems to have served as a makeshift “collected works,” contained ten plays by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, including a copy of The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634), attributed to Fletcher and Shakespeare.29 All of these are now disbound, resembling the modernized texts pictured in Figure 12. Yet Hunter’s later, less valuable Shakespearean texts seem not to have necessitated the same conservation measures.

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