LITMIR.BIZ

Figure 12. University of Glasgow Library Sp. Coll. Hunterian Co.3.33, twelve early printed plays formerly in one volume. University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections.

      Making Shakespeare in Early Modernity

      Behind the modern-looking, individually bound book lies a significantly wider range of material contexts within which Shakespeare’s works might have been encountered. It is a point made clear in the example of the AB catalog at Cambridge, but here we find a measure of consistency across libraries in ways of treating books in the early period and in modernity. The difference is in the broadest sense curatorial but with profound ramifications for readers. Where once it was acceptable and in most cases financially necessary to bind rare books into larger volumes to ensure their preservation, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the same books disbound and reshaped into individual units for precisely the same reason, only under different assumptions about the relative value of aspects of the book to be preserved.³² These library and collecting routines go beyond simple preservation: they reify notions of a text’s canonicity; they selectively impose the value systems and bibliographical expectations of the culture in which the collector is situated. An autonomous Shakespearean text today is a desired Shakespearean text, free from the clamor of intertextuality and resubmitted to later readers shorn of its history, “for all time.” Such texts reflect and reinforce notions of stylistic unity, authenticity, and other modern desires that now seem intrinsic to these works. The anthologies and multitext volumes of earlier owners reflect a different set of desires—desires less familiar to us because of biases inherent in modern ways of making (and making available) Shakespeare’s books.

      Moving back beyond the work of modern collectors, for whom early printed texts were necessarily secondhand acquisitions, to that of Shakespeare’s first readers, for whom rarity, exchange value, and conservation were less obviously determining factors, we find similar principles of assembly reflecting bias in the structure of books—though the bias is of a different kind. Figure 13 reproduces a manuscript table of contents from a composite volume of early printed plays now held at the Folger Shakespeare Library.³³ The volume, which contains copies of Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV (1632) and Richard III (1629), resembles the collections of play quartos explored above, except that it was bound up much earlier, shortly after the date of its latest imprint, 1635. The reader, who likely bought most or all of the texts firsthand, seems to have had interests in the lives of the major political figures of the past. Alongside the two history plays by Shakespeare are, among others, Thomas Heywood’s King Edward the Fourth (1626); The Troublesome Raine of King John (1622), attributed at the time to Shakespeare; Ben Jonson’s Cataline his conspiracy (1635); George Chapman’s Caesar and Pompey (1631); the anonymous Tragedy of Nero (1633); and Heywood’s two-part play, The Troubles of Queen Elizabeth (1632).³⁴ This arrangement may reflect the same desire to preserve that would motivate eighteenth- and nineteenth-century collectors to construct similar composite volumes. But it also reflects the more immediate bias of readerly selection, the buyer having chosen the texts and commissioned the binding at the time of the initial sale, not in accordance with the dictates of a preexisting literary canon but out of his or her own intellectual preferences or needs. Where the value systems of modern collectors such as David Garrick, William Hunter, and the British Library are often hidden in seemingly neutral curatorial practices, those of firsthand readers such as this one are visible in the artifact itself. The collection, a kind of personal anthology, documents one reader’s interest and partiality, impressed into the comparatively malleable structure of a premodern codex.

      Of the surviving early assemblages of printed material containing one or more works by Shakespeare, many, like this historical “lives” volume, have a degree of thematic coherence that we can recognize and therefore interpret: they comprise a set of books, likely sold unbound or stitched, organized into an anthology or a collection based on their associated content. We can presume the involvement of a reader or collector in the absence of identical extant configurations (which would reflect a part-edition sold ready-bound by a retailer).³⁵ But more practical, producer-initiated schemes of organization are also apparent in these early compilations. Texts of similar size or works printed by the same shop could be bundled together, creating volumes of consistent form but seemingly arbitrary content (a practice that, scholars have shown, has roots in incunabular culture).³⁶ Texts that were conceived and sold in segments—multipart plays, for example, or works with “continuations”—also seem to have encouraged the production of composite bound volumes. One volume now at the Folger combines copies of Shakespeare’s I Henry IV (1604) and 2 Henry IV (1600) into a single contemporary binding, with a provenance traceable to the seventeenth-century owner in whose collection they stood together as a unit.³⁷