Shakespeare in Bundles
Jeffrey Todd Knight
University of Washington
jtknight@u.washington.edu
- When Shakespeare scholars refer to a work’s
historical context, they posit a largely imaginary relationship between two or
more texts or textual categories. There are no first-hand accounts of
composition and few of reception—no traces of direct links between, say, The
Tempest and travel literature, or between the history plays and Tudor
propaganda. Scholars use what is available—archives, in a broad sense—to
determine what might be called imagined scenes of reading: Shakespeare at his
desk with Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals,” for example, or audience members bringing
to the Globe a political understanding derived from the pamphlets,
proclamations, and other topical early print materials now in special
collections libraries.
- In this space I would like to consider some
material relationships between texts from early modernity—that is, links and
reader associations that are not only imagined, but evident in libraries and
editions of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Contextual or extrinsic reading
challenges any absolute distinction between literature and history,[1] but it also reinforces many of
the oppositions that guide traditional intrinsic reading, especially between
“text” and “context,” the work of literature as a stable, bounded unit of
information against the clamor of external events. Readers in the early modern
period had a more complex relationship with books. George Herbert, to take a
familiar example, elaborates on the devotional reading experience in The
Temple with seemingly peculiar attention to the Bible’s structural makeup,
its assembly or compilation: “Oh that I knew how all thy lights combine,” he
marvels, “And the configurations of their glorie! / Seeing not only how each
verse doth shine, / But all the constellations of the story” (“Holy Scriptures
(II),” lines 1-4). Herbert’s choice of words and metaphor here turn on the idea
of mixture, and in a sense, interactivity: the readerly desire to see into the
book’s composition or arrangement. This is an idea that has not, until recently
perhaps, been applicable without qualification to books in modernity, even to
those as obviously compiled as the Bible. [2]
How would “configuration” or “constellation,” in place of “context,” help
scholars of early modern culture read historically? What would it tell us about
the conditions of intra- and intertextuality in Shakespeare’s time?
- In simple terms of application, configuration is
the more flexible concept. It lies outside the text-context binary and
therefore does not depend on the stability or boundedness of works for meaning
any more than early modern readers did. A Shakespearean configuration could be
a mixture of narrative events, grammatical units, or other kinds of textual
elements in a text by Shakespeare. It could just as easily be a mixture of
individual Shakespearean texts in a binding, such as an edition or an early Sammelband.[3] For a culture in which rhetorical
copia, imitation, and borrowing defined writing habits, and in which
books were often sold unbound—custom-made to order for the reader—configuration
in both senses was on display.[4]
- Scholars of Shakespearean reception history have
begun to discuss the common early modern practice of binding texts together:
that is, the preservation of quartos and octavos, and the reduction of costs,
by compiling multiple printed works into single volumes at the time of
purchase.[5]
In the domain of printers and publishers, the legacy of this practice, which
goes back as far as incunable culture,[6]
can be traced in multi-text configurations that have played a vital role in
marketing, and differentiating, Shakespeare’s plays. Producer-initiated bundles—a
term that distinguishes them from reader-bound volumes—were abundant in book
shops; W.W. Greg showed that printers would often issue unsold stock in nonce
collections, or groups of plays printed at different times, as a unit.[7] But the first large-scale
Shakespearean bundling project was likely the infamous Pavier Quartos,
comprising ten early play texts issued by Thomas Pavier in 1619. The publishing
strategy is well known: Pavier spotted a hole in the market and began printing
quartos that could be bound together –a few that he owned, a few derelict
editions, and then several that were not his property—with the ultimate
intention of forming a Collected Works volume.[8]
The project was brought to a swift end by the King’s Men when the official
Collected Works, the single-volume 1623 Folio anthology, went to press.
- The story, of course, is more complicated: as I
have shown elsewhere, the Pavier bundles that survive show evidence of varying
arrangements, at least two of which included a play not by Shakespeare, Thomas
Heywood’s A Woman Killed With Kindness (1617), bound side-by-side with
the high-canonical Henry V (“Invisible Ink”). Here, I think, it is
useful to pause over the “configuration” of such dramatic texts to see the
changing historical function of bundling. For Thomas Pavier, like most printers
in the hand-press era, combined texts on a principle of inclusion: republishing
Henry V (to which he owned the rights) was part of an effort to print
many plays (including some owned by others) in flexible, linkable formats, which
even admitted non-Shakespearean works, such as Heywood’s. Today’s publishers,
in contrast, bundle the same early modern plays on a principle of exclusion.
The only multi-text configurations in which Henry V is currently printed
are Collected Works such The Norton or Riverside Shakespeare, and
outside of instructional environments, the play is most commonly read in
single-text editions. But Heywood’s work is made available today almost
exclusively in multi-text, multi-author bundles: Oxford’s A Woman Killed
with Kindness and other Domestic Plays, for example, or Revels Editions’ Plays
on Women. The former groups A Woman Killed With Kindness with the
anonymous Arden of Faversham and the collaborative Witch of Edmonton
under a rubric of genre, the domestic tragedy;[9] the latter groups the play with Arden
of Faversham, Middleton and Dekker’s Roaring Girl, and Middleton’s A
Chaste Maid in Cheapside, under a rubric of theme, women. No comparable
bundle using Henry V—say, Henry V and other Tudor Histories,
or Plays on Patriotism—would be formed under modern systems of
publishing. Shakespeare, today, is not commonly mixed into generic or thematic
anthologies because author, or authorial corpus, is the near-exclusive
organizing concept in his case.
- The divergence of modern from early
modern attitudes toward text configuration is also visible within individual
works, as Herbert’s use of the term indicates. The edition of Henry V
owned by Pavier is representative of a kind of marketing based on
constellations of events or characters, which was common in the period. Its
full title was The Chronicle History of Henry the fift, with his battel
fought in Agin Court in France. Together with an-cient Pistoll.
The early name of the play in quarto thus mirrored the physical structure of
the early quarto volume in which it would, in most cases, have been arranged.
The title page, which functioned as an advertisement in the bookshop, presents Henry
V as itself a bundle, a com-position in the sense of a provisional unity of
“placed-together” elements: in this case, the Battle of Agincourt and the
character of Pistol.
- This method of presentation is
familiar to anyone who has encountered small-format plays by Shakespeare in
archives. The early quarto of Richard III, for example, calls the play The
Tragedy of King Richard the third. Containing, His treacherous Plots against
his brother Clarence: the pittiefull murther of his innocent nephewes: his
tyrannical usurpation, and so on. Such titles are curious from a modern
perspective: they direct the reader’s attention to intra-textual relationships
between events and between characters; they open and close paths of
interpretation, as other aspects of textual presentation do. (A modern
publisher would not think of advertising “the devotion of pitiful Lucky” on the
cover of Waiting for Godot, for example.) Long titles, moreover, are
sublimated in large-format collections of plays, which were beginning to appear
in Shakespeare’s time and which form the basis for modern, single-volume
anthologies. The catalog of the 1623 Folio lists The Life of Henry the Fift;
modern student editions title the play simply Henry V. Modern text
presentation, in this way, distills each work down to a single determining
image—sometimes a character, a couple, or a decontextualized event. This is
perhaps appropriate in an era of self-enclosed, non-configured (and
non-configurable) books.
- What can context mean in Shakespeare studies? Beyond the imagined scenes of reading, which have served historical criticism for three decades now, the notion of a play’s relationship with other plays, other texts, and other aspects of culture—within and outside its ostensible boundaries—can be more expansive, and indeed more historical. George Herbert describes the constellations and configurations of a book, the Bible. Early modern and modern bundles of dramatic material suggest that how texts “combine,” to use Herbert’s word, can direct aspects of interpretation. In one sense, an attention to Shakespearean configurations is a kind of radical historicism, taking the logic of reading in context down to the level of the material book: how real readers met and interpreted Henry V, for example, in the physical, historical contexts of bound volumes. But the same attention yields something like a historical approach to literary form and structure as well—a willingness to see material “configuration” as something that plays itself out, and partly originates, in the combinatory practices of the literary producer. Maybe in this sense, we do have first-hand accounts of composition and reception. We just have not seen them yet.
