LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

second tetralogy: aging rulers and the containment of rebellion. Thameseidos, written at a moment of great cultural anxiety over succession, pleads with an aging Elizabeth to “Liue thou for euer! … To maintaine Artes, as hitherto th’ast done; / For wayle the Muses must, when thou art gone.”⁴² The two books of elegies mourn the death of Sir Horatio Palavicino, the Elizabethan intelligencer, aristocrat, and well-known financier of England’s wars.⁴³ And the two political pamphlets concern Irish and French rebellion over land.⁴⁴ Taken in this context, it is difficult to imagine how Falstaff’s exuberance at the king’s death in 2 Henry IV—“The laws of England are at my commandment” (5.3.125–26),⁴⁵ he famously exclaims—could elicit anything but contempt. Indeed, in this archepiscopal anthology, the pathos of the final scenes might well reside not, as it does for us, in Hal’s repudiation of Falstaff, but in the epilogue’s appeal to “pray for the Queen” (30).

      In all of these cases, the compiling agent has created a rubric for interpretation in book form that we can begin to theorize, and such rubrics, it is clear, were not fully determined by the criteria of author, genre, and textual autonomy that would guide later forms of assembly. To be sure, these criteria did exist in early print culture: the Folger volume containing copies of 1 and 2 Henry IV is an example of a compilation that demonstrates authorial and textual continuity (insofar as what we recognize as authors and texts today are taken to be reflected in this earlier period’s theatrical practices), and several early collections, such as the Bridgewater Library at the Huntington, do contain volumes of exclusively Shakespearean materials.⁴⁶ But the sixteenthand seventeenth-century compilations that map on to these categories were subject to a degree of contingency and reader intervention that is alien to modern norms of textual order.⁴⁷

      A well-known example of this contingent canonicity is the group of plays now referred to as the Pavier Quartos.⁴⁸ Though the circumstances of their production are still being debated, these texts are generally taken to constitute an early effort at gathering Shakespeare’s dramatic works into a single volume—a volume whose constituent parts were also apparently sold in independent units. The collection, sometimes called a “nonce collection” to highlight its ad hoc quality,⁴⁹ was published by Thomas Pavier in 1619, four years before the First Folio, with several of the individual title pages bearing false imprints and dates to hide the fact that Pavier did not own the rights to all of the plays. The first three quartos in the series—The Whole Contention, parts 1 and 2, and Pericles—were printed with continuous signatures, suggesting that an authorial collection was being planned. And indeed, several groupings of the texts either survive in early bindings that resemble the “collected works” format or show evidence of having once been configured in this way.⁵⁰ However, the latter seven quartos in the series—A Yorkshire Tragedy, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, King Lear, Henry V, Sir John Oldcastle, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream—were signed individually, as if to stand outside of the collection, which was an indication, for many who have told the story, that Pavier was guilty of piracy.⁵¹ But the texts’ inconsistencies also demonstrate that nonteleological notions of book assembly governed even collections organized by author such as this one, and that the Pavier Quartos might be more profitably understood and read as a consumer-driven compilation rather than a never-realized “Works.” Of the two known “complete sets” that survive in early bindings, neither follow the continuous signatures—ostensibly, instructions to the binder—set out in the first three quartos: one, now at Texas Christian University, was arranged in the seventeenth century with The Yorkshire Tragedy positioned between The Whole Contention and Pericles; and in the other, now at the Folger, A Midsummer Night’s Dream assumes the second position in the set.⁵² The contingency of book formation in the period is vividly evoked in a third example: a set of Pavier Quartos at the Folger which, now disbound, once contained a text that was neither published by Pavier nor attributed to Shakespeare.⁵³ The volume, which I discuss further in Chapter 5, stands today in a modern binding that includes only The Whole Contention and Pericles. But according to a contents list preserved in the flyleaves, the texts were originally accompanied by Thomas Heywood’s play A Woman Killed with Kindness, a quarto that in fact occupied the first position in the otherwise Shakespearean book.⁵⁴ The volume shows that early owners and retailers, enabled by the built-in flexibility of printed products like the Pavier Quartos, could make books—and frameworks for reading—both within and outside prescribed schemes of organization.

      Shakespeare, Assembly, and Interpretation

      With this broad outline of the contexts and stakes of Shakespearean book assembly, I conclude this chapter by taking a closer look at five early compilations that, like this last volume, combine Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean works in formats not set out in advance by producers, but that embody distinct possibilities for interpretation grounded in historical forms of text assembly. Such Sammelbände are strikingly numerous in archives when we know where to look, though their composite materiality is rarely noted outside of the local catalog notes and almost never discussed as an aspect of meaning-making by literary critics. Like many of the assemblages I have surveyed in this chapter, these volumes reflect the desires of readers or retailers, who were predisposed to compile or “bundle” in a system of book production very different from ours. But unlike many of the Sammelbände above, the following specimens contain Shakespearean works in contexts for reading and interpretation that are significantly at odds with modern textual categories and standards of literary value, stretching our historical imagination. Indeed, where such volumes survive, their present untreated or unprocessed states are often attributable to some miracle of provenance that caused them to escape modernization. Reading these unlikely survivals together, as records of early reception practices and the organizing categories of early book culture, gives us different, often internally contrasting Shakespearean works in which potential interpretations grow and proliferate.

       Folger STC 22341.8

      My first compilation exemplifies the narrative of loss and recovery that often attends Shakespearean Sammelbände. Folger STC 22341.8 is a unique copy of The Passionate Pilgrim by W. Shakespeare (1599) that was rediscovered in 1920 in a lumber room at an English country house, where it had apparently been held since it was purchased and made into a book during the Renaissance.⁵⁵ The volume, which retains its original limp vellum binding, includes four additional octavos of poetry printed around the same time;⁵⁶ they are, in order, Shakespeare’s Lucrece, Thomas Middleton’s The Ghost of Lucrece, the little-known sonnet sequence Emaricdulfe … by E. C. Esquier, and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. The contents are remarkable for how they seem to lend themselves from the standpoint of production to such multigenre, multiauthor forms of compilation. The Passionate Pilgrim represents something of a microcosm of the volume, mixing Shakespearean with non-Shakespearean works into a verse miscellany.⁵⁷ And there is evidence suggesting that this edition of Venus and Adonis was sold as a unit with The Passionate Pilgrim, as the same two texts are preserved in similar bindings in other archives and bibliographers have pointed out that they probably issued from a common retailer, perhaps marketed and sold together.⁵⁸

      Structurally and thematically, moreover, there are strong associations between the two works. Four of the first eleven poems in The Passionate Pilgrim are fragments of the Ovidian Venus and Adonis story, dealing, often in sexually explicit terms, with the goddess’s advances on the unwilling boy.⁵⁹ The narrative poem’s guiding trope of role reversal, already present in the collection, also resonates obliquely with the opening lines of The Passionate Pilgrim anthology, which do not come from Ovid’s story:⁶⁰

      When my love swears that she is made of truth

      I do believe her, though I know she lies,

      That she might think me some untutored youth

      Unskilful in the world’s false forgeries. (1.1–4)

      The lines, along with those of the collection’s next poem—which malign the speaker’s tempting “female

Скачать книгу