Configuring the Book
Andrew
Murphy
University
of St Andrews
adm6@st-andrews.ac.uk
- As
the contributions gathered in this special issue of EMLS indicate, there
are many different ways in which we can conceive of Shakespearean
configurations. What I would like to focus on in this brief piece is a quite
literal form of configuration: namely, the physical makeup of the printed Shakespeare
text, how it changes, and the implications of those changes. This is a matter,
to some extent, of size, but it is not just about size. The
history of changing configurations of the physical book is interwoven with the
history of readers’ access to the text. Size matters, in this sense, but
often in rather unexpected ways.
- Shakespeare begins, of course, in quarto.
His first datable surviving printed text — Richard Field’s 1593 Venus and
Adonis — appeared in that format, and the following year’s Titus
Andronicus was also printed in quarto. But the print histories of the poems
and the plays soon diverged. After a second quarto edition, in 1594, Venus
and Adonis was downsized to octavo and, with two exceptions — even smaller sextodecimos
published in 1636 and 1675 — the poem continued to be reproduced in octavo
through to the end of the seventeenth century.[2]
Strikingly, the number of text pages in the octavo editions is uniform with
that of the quarto editions. Indeed, the octavos reproduce the page divisions
of the quarto editions (an indication that the compositors of the first octavo
edition must have used one of the quartos as copy).[3]
One implication of this reproduction process is that while the octavos would
have required the same amount of compositorial time, they would have taken half
the time of the quartos to print (since each octavo sheet included twice as
many pages as the quarto sheet) and, crucially, the octavos would have required
half as many sheets as the quarto for the same size of press run. The octavos
were, then, significantly cheaper to produce. It is hard to know whether the
savings involved were passed on to purchasers, but it is possible that they
were and we can certainly say that the small-sized editions were popular: Venus
and Adonis ran to a total of fourteen smaller-format editions between 1595
and 1675.[4]
- The Rape of Lucrece follows a roughly similar track. First
published in quarto in 1594, it reappeared in octavo four years later. By 1655,
a total of eight octavos had been published. In this instance, the poem, which
had taken up 96 text pages in quarto, was reduced to 72 pages (in an edition of
1598, and two editions in 1600) and then to 64 pages.[5]
The savings on paper and press work were, in this instance, not quite so great
as those achieved in the case of Venus and Adonis, but still, there
would have been some significant savings and potentially these could have been
used to reduce the price, should the publishers have chosen to pass the savings
on to their customers.[6]
- When we turn to the plays, we find just one
instance of a text moving downward in format from quarto to octavo. This is the
variant text of 3 Henry VI, titled The True Tragedie of Richard Duke
of Yorke . . . , printed by Peter Short for Thomas Millington in 1595. Short
had printed one Shakespeare-related text previously: the 1594 quarto of The
Taming of A Shrew. He was involved in producing two further Shakespeare
plays after the above-mentioned octavo. In 1597, he would appear to have taken
over the printing of the variant text of Richard III, after Valentine
Simmes had completed sheets A to G; in this case, he would, in all likelihood,
have been following a formatting decision set by another printer.[7]
In the following year, Short printed the last Shakespeare play he would print,
a quarto of 1 Henry IV for Andrew Wise. Taking the run of texts as a
whole—Q A Shrew; O True Tragedie; final sheets Q RIII; Q 1HIV—it
is probably a safe bet simply to conclude that the octavo edition of The
True Tragedie is an anomaly. It is interesting to note, however, that
Short’s work printing Shakespeare editions did not end with the Wise 1 Henry
IV quarto. In 1598, he produced a Lucrece for John Harrington and,
in the following year, a Venus and Adonis for William Leake.[8]
Both these texts were octavos, and thus part of the run of texts that signalled
the poems’ popularity. So a possible, alternative way of looking at Short might
thus be to say that he sits at the point of intersection between different
formatting choices, with his 3 Henry VI representing an experiment in
shifting the playtext down to a format that was cheaper to produce and which
could, potentially at least, have been offered to bookbuyers at a lower cost
than the standard quarto.[9]
The experiment was not pursued beyond this one edition and it is difficult to
say why.[10]
One wonders what might have happened if it had been tried with a play that
might likely have been more appealing to the reading public than 3 Henry VI.[11]
- In fact, however, what we get with the
plays is not a shift downward in format, but rather a shift upward: to
the monumental—and expensive—folios of 1623, 1632, 1663/4 and 1685. The decisiveness
of this shift is striking. If we take the period between the appearance of Titus
in 1594, and of the First Folio in 1623, a span of 29 years, we find that a
total of 58 editions of individual Shakespeare plays appeared in print: an
average of exactly 2 per year.[12]
By contrast, in the entire seventy-seven year period between the publication of
F1 and the end of the seventeenth century only 33 individual play editions were
published. After 1623, then, the annual rate of quarto play publication fell to
just 21% of the pre-F1 rate. It is important not to take these raw numbers
wholly at face value. By 1623, Shakespeare had been dead for seven years and
there were no new titles to be brought to publication, so the
publication of old titles might well have tailed off anyway, decade by decade,
even without the appearance of the folios. Also, of course, the eighteen-year period
during which the theatres were closed is likely to have had an impact on
playtext publishing, as there would have been no contemporary performances to
serve as a driver prompting new editions on the backs of popular productions.[13]
- The extent to which the quarto segment of the publishing
market contracted in the wake of F1 is still striking. Lukas Erne has argued
that Shakespeare imagined himself as a “dual mode” writer – producing “literary”
texts with an eye to publication, while accepting that they would have to be
configured into alternative “scaled down” versions for performance (passim).
What we can say in relation to the publication history of the plays is that
whatever Shakespeare’s intentions as a writer were (and these remain, of
course, ultimately unknowable), the readerly audience that he actually achieved
narrowed considerably from 1623, when the price of access to the text of the
plays increased very considerably. The cost of F1 was between 30 and 40 times
that of a typical quarto, pricing it well outside the casual purchasing power
of all but the better-off segment of readers (taking the typical price of a
quarto to be sixpence and the typical price range of F1 to be from 15s to £1).[14]
By contrast with the history of the poems, where a downsizing of format may
have facilitated and garnered an expanded readership, the effect of configuring
Shakespeare into a collected folio volume was the contraction of the
playwright’s readership to a small, relatively elite core. There is a further qualification
that might be registered here. There are far more plays than there are poems
and, had all of the plays been available in quarto, assembling a full
collection would, of course, have cost about as much as purchasing a copy of
F1. My point, however, is that F1 effectively creates an all-or-nothing access
point: if you do not have the minimum entrance payment of 15s, you do not get
to cross the access threshold.
- It is not uncommon for scholars to speculate
as to how our understanding of Shakespeare would be different if F1 had never
been published. The default conclusion of such imaginings is to note that,
without F1, we might well have a much smaller canon of plays, eighteen titles
having appeared for the first time in the Folio. But one could wonder also what
might have happened if the Folio had not locked the playwright’s work into an
elite—and expensive—format. (One thinks here of William Prynne’s complaint that
“Shackspeers Plaies are printed in the best Crowne paper, far better than most
Bibles” [**6v]). What if the octavo 3 Henry VI had proved to
be a successful experiment, prompting a general downsizing of the playtexts, so
that they could have reached, and could have continued to reach, a general
audience over the course of the seventeenth century, and beyond? And how might
the history of the greater cultural configurations of Shakespeare have
been different, if smaller had triumphed rather than bigger? Might we, for
instance, have inherited a more dispersed and less monolithic Shakespeare? We certainly
would have inherited a far less uniform Shakespeare, in that different versions
of individual plays might have continued to be circulated, rather than being –
as they are in F1 – reduced to singularity (one King Lear, one Hamlet,
one Henry V . . . ). Might the relationship between the poems and the
plays be different if what might be styled the “perspective lines” of textual
formatting had created more of a sense of equivalence between them? As it was,
the poems were excluded from F1 and, once the run of octavo editions of the
poems came to an end, they entered into a state of supplementarity in relation
to the collected plays, at least until the end of the eighteenth century (if
not beyond).
- We can only speculate with regard to most
of these matters. What we can confidently say, however, is that the model established
by F1—of the expensively produced edition (albeit an edition that included the
collected plays) sold at high cost to a relatively narrow readership—was
remarkably persistent. There were challenges along the way, of course. In the
eighteenth century, for example, Scottish and Irish publishers (and some
English publishers, such as Robert Walker) sought to undercut the dominant
Shakespeare publishing cartel by producing cheap texts, generally in octavo or
duodecimo formats. And, in the wake of the 1774 Donaldson v. Beckett
House of Lords ruling, which effectively confirmed Shakespeare as a “public
domain” author, a number of publishers began to offer cheaper, smaller-scale
editions, both of individual plays and collected works. But the expensive,
exclusive text persisted. As Simon Eliot has noted of the English book trade more
generally, it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the default book
trade model of seeking high profit margins on low volume sales was finally broken,
with low-priced, rather than high-priced books finally coming to account for
the largest percentage share of publishers’ outputs.[15]
This shift in publishing priorities coincided with a significant expansion of
access to education in the UK, with the result that Shakespeare gained a
readership much greater than he had ever achieved before.
- I have tracked the emergence of this readership in Shakespeare for the People, and have noted there the central importance of John Dicks’ edition to the wide dispersal of Shakespeare’s text among a very broad audience. The key to Dicks’ success was the manner in which he exploited a variety of formats in selling his Shakespearean wares.[16] Initially, the plays were issued in paper-covered numbers, including two plays, at a penny per number. Subsequently, the plays were gathered into a single cloth bound volume, priced at 2s., quickly followed by a 1s paper-covered collected volume. The variety of formats ensured a broad readership, with Dicks ultimately achieving sales in excess of one million (Dicks 451). Finally, we might say that in the Dicks edition, the potential that had been suggested by the early modern octavo editions was fully realised: by configuring Shakespeare in multiple, inexpensive, formats the publisher brought the writer to a wide audience. But Shakespeare had, of course, already by then become . . . “Shakespeare.” And there is something ineradicable about that process of monumentalisation – a process that had its roots, at least partly, I am suggesting, in the triumph of folio over quarto. There are configurations and there are reconfigurations; but some configurations cannot ever quite be undone.
