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CHAPTER 2

Making Shakespeare’s Books

Material Intertextuality from the Bindery to the Conservation Lab

Among the most highly valued items in special collections at Oxford’s Bodleian Library is a volume of Shakespeare’s poetry containing quartos of Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and the Sonnets gathered together by an eighteenth-century owner named Thomas Caldecott.¹ So highly valued is the book that it cannot be consulted according to the usual procedures. One must first appeal for special permission at Duke Humfrey’s Library, then trudge across Broad Street to the New Library to read it under close supervision in the Modern Papers Room—and for good reason. The volume brings together rare early editions of its three constituent works: Venus and Adonis and Lucrece from a 1594 printing and the Sonnets from 1609. The texts themselves are, in the language of cataloging, “perfect,” with no major defects or latter-day adulterations;² their pages have been cropped, washed, and rebound in stately tooled leather with crisp marbled endpapers. Only a few scant traces of the books’ four centuries of use and circulation remain, most of which are annotations written in by modern archivists and connoisseurs. The earliest record of provenance is one that Caldecott himself left in the flyleaves: “I purchased the contents of this volume June 1796 of an obscure bookseller of the name of Vanderberg near St. Margaret’s Church Westminster. He had cut them with Several others out of a Volume, put each of them separately into blue paper, and priced them at 4s 5d.”

Rare books most often appear to us today as material artifacts without material histories.³ Aside from the occasional binder’s or conservator’s note, there are few reasons to suspect that the generally uniform, modern-looking texts we consult in special-collections libraries have ever existed in other configurations—that ways of using and assigning value to them have ever been different from our own. But Caldecott’s Shakespeare shows evidence of at least three modes of readerly engagement, not a single overarching one. First, working backward, there is that of its current owner, Oxford University, which values the book’s early imprints and relatively unspoiled condition and which protects it using a special classification number and a curatorial policy granting readers only the most limited access in highly controlled environments. Second, there is that of Vanderberg and Caldecott, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century owners respectively, who valued the texts as collectors’ items and who had no reservation about physically restructuring them to maximize profit (in the case of the former) or prestige (in the case of the latter). Third, and more distantly, there is whatever early modern compilation these items might have inhabited before they were cut into individual units and anthologized in a morocco-bound volume in 1796. At each of these historical junctures, questions arise about the influence of archival practices over our perceptions of literary artifacts. How does the administration of texts for careful scholarly use in today’s libraries conceal the work of earlier readers and collectors, who were sometimes more likely to reshape books according to their own desires than to venerate them as reservoirs of literary content, frozen in time? More gravely perhaps, how did the work of earlier collectors—in wresting texts from their contexts, in building volumes of one author’s collected verse—conceal even earlier forms of textual organization that may have seemed to them unprofitable, distasteful, or not worth saving?

Chapter 1 raised these questions through case studies of compiling and disbinding activities at two key early libraries. This chapter moves outward to consider textual (re)assembly across multiple institutions and early collectors, focusing on a single figure: Shakespeare. Using a range of archival specimens that, like Caldecott’s volume, preserve evidence of their being engineered and organized by successive owners, but which have long been of interest only to bibliographers, I argue that the parameters of reading and interpretation are frequently established and sometimes imposed by the collectors, compilers, conservators, and curators who in a very literal sense make books. For each new set of attitudes concerning the order of texts in books and libraries, an earlier set of attitudes is partially concealed, preventing certain reader-text interactions and enabling a host of others. As the specimens I examined in my first chapter have begun to suggest, the problem is acute in the case of early printed texts, which were assembled, organized, and read in ways that are foreign to us today. Before they were extracted into individual units and clothed in decorated covers, many such texts—particularly small-format literary works—existed in composite volumes, user- and retailer-initiated anthologies, topical arrangements of disparate authors or genres, evoking complex histories of early book production and reception. But such texts are only ever available to us now through the mediations of readers and owners who suppress those histories—who (perhaps inevitably) remake what they acquire according to their own historically situated notion of the book. This chapter affirms that these processes of making and remaking books play a critical role in generating meaning, establishing links between works in the same binding, which may be read or ignored, or dissolving such links so that works can stand alone. Moving from the familiar, individuated Shakespearean texts most often found in libraries today to the radically unfamiliar assemblages of early print culture, I propose that we can ground historical interpretations—and discover new ones—in the largely reader-driven, recombinant productions of Renaissance writers’ first audiences.

Making Shakespeare in Modernity

Shakespeare has long been a primary point of reference in modern bibliographical scholarship in English. As the scientific New Bibliography gave way to a more reflexive textual criticism in the late twentieth century, attention shifted decisively from the ideals of eclectic editing to the varied representational machinery through which texts and canons are transmitted in time.⁴ Following D. F. McKenzie’s influential dictum, “forms effect meaning,” critics interested in the materiality of texts have worked for two decades or more to show that print apparatuses—from early paratexts to modern classroom editions—are implicated in literary strategies and historical patterns of reception.⁵ But as I have been arguing, while the compositors, vendors, and editors of Shakespearean texts have been revealed as important agents in meaningmaking, those most directly responsible for the configuration and classification of texts by Shakespeare are not often discussed. We saw in the last chapter that binding, curatorship, and conservation—like other aspects of textual presentation—produce rather than simply make available literary works to be read. As with editing (or perhaps more fundamentally than with editing), collecting practices circumscribe interpretive possibilities within a recognizable, physical text. And also as with editing, these practices are inexorably subjective: the resulting text does not transparently re-present a literary work that exists, fully formed, in advance; it impresses into the historical substructure of that work the values, assumptions, and biases of those who make it, at each stage of its construction.

McKenzie’s analysis of the early modern printing house dispensed with “the erroneous assumption that a book was normally put into production as an independent unit.”⁶ Works were printed in parts, frequently across multiple presses, and put together in nonuniform ways that vex attempts to describe a standardized practice. On the consumption end of early book culture, however, the primacy of the independent unit of reading and interpretation is more often than not upheld. Modern collectors standardized early printed texts of great value as a matter of conservation, and in each multibook volume like Caldecott’s Shakespeare, broken up and rebound in individual units in modernity, taxonomies of text, work, and author from the modern period were made to organize the reception of premodern literature. In the earliest domain of printed literary materials in English, the works of the later Middle Ages, scholars have made much of the “clusters of literary writing” discovered in Sammelbände, the “fluid canonicity” reminiscent of the manuscript miscellany that seems to have been generated in everyday acts of anthologization by readers and printers.⁷ Yet by the time we reach the age of Shakespeare in archives, we find books and collections that are seemingly indistinguishable from modern ones—that is, neat rows of independent, leather-bound plays and books of poetry. In nearly every case, as we will see, the bindings, labels, and catalog identifiers are products of the last two centuries.

The works of the English Renaissance, in fact, offer a particularly promising field of primary materials within which to pose the question of how early books were made (or unmade) in this way. As common sense suggests, the likelihood that a text has undergone modernizing structural renovations such as those sketched out in the last chapter is directly proportionate to how valuable it was in the eyes of modern owners and collectors. Texts now considered literary, therefore, often reach us as the most heavily processed of all early printed materials, a fact obvious to researchers of the period’s lowerprestige, nonliterary books, which are far more frequently found in original bindings and seemingly unkempt Sammelbände. Within that literary subset, the dramatic works by Shakespeare—which Thomas Bodley famously ranked among the “riffe-raffes” and “baggage books” to be excluded from his library⁸—were eventually of the utmost value and thus subject to all forms of bibliographical intervention that may have come into fashion. As a result, the surviving archive of Shakespearean texts has a particularly varied morphology, though it is one that has been oversimplified, or suppressed, by modern collecting practices.

A representative example is the sole copy of the “sixth quarto” of Pericles (1635) now held at the British Library.⁹ Like many extant Shakespearean plays, the text is trimly bound in luxury leather as it might have adorned a gentleman’s shelf in the nineteenth century, though this was not the case.¹⁰ The book was one of many bequeathed to the library by David 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.

Figure 9. An eighteenth-century contents list from British Library C.21.b.40, listing seven plays in a book. © British Library Board.

Figure 10. An earlier arrangement of texts written on the verso of a back page of a different item in British Library C.21.b.40. © British Library Board.

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

Figure 11. A copy of the apocryphal Birth of Merlin bound here facing a religious pamphlet. By permission of the Master and Fellows of St. John’s College, Cambridge.

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. One late copy of Hamlet (1676) was left in a socalled tract volume containing over twenty texts, both printed books and manuscripts, on subjects as diverse as the pay of British land forces, Horace, and reform efforts at Oxford.³⁰ In this case, it was not the Shakespearean text but the manuscripts that were extracted in the twentieth century and given a new classification.³¹

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

Figure 13. Folger Shakespeare Library STC 4619, a contents list showing a seventeenthcentury collection of plays. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Other methods of organizing such texts were idiosyncratic and depended on the particular sites in which they were to be used. The archepiscopal library at Lambeth Palace, for example (which in the early modern period took no great interest in literary texts), bound small-format books like Shakespeare’s into compilations by publication year, each volume thus serving as a partial record of that year’s printed output or perhaps that year’s reading. This “yearbook” approach to text management seems to have affiliations with Archbishop Parker’s own collecting habits, as it produced, at Lambeth as in Parker’s library at Cambridge, an abundance of flexible, parchmentbound resource anthologies that are indifferent to modern distinctions between literary and nonliterary, canonical and ephemeral.³⁸ When the archepiscopal librarians acquired a copy of 2 Henry IV, for example, they bound the play with other material printed in 1600. The Shakespearean text became the fifth of six booklets in a parchment binding, including a verse tribute to Queen Elizabeth called E. W. his Thameseidos, the political poem England’s Hope Against Irish Hate, a declaration of war by the king of France against the Duke of Savoy, and two collections of funerary elegies in Latin and English.³⁹ Sure enough, when attitudes toward printed books began to shift in modernity, this volume was remade according to the systems of literary value that I have been outlining. But this time it was a thief, not a dealer or owner, who separated the Shakespearean book from the others, leaving a gap in the binding that is still visible today.⁴⁰

Here we can take up Henry IV as a way to begin considering the interpretive implications of the patterns of assembly that I have sketched out in this and the previous chapter. In my discussion of Hunter’s collection at Glasgow, I identified a volume, now disbound, that once contained comedies, masques, and histories, including two Shakespearean texts, 1 and 2 Henry IV. Such an assemblage, it seems, would square with the current critical consensus that the plays blend history with comedy, evoking a world in which, as David Scott Kastan has shown, “exuberance and excess will not be incorporated into the stable hierarchies of the body politic.”⁴¹ But another volume that I described above, the Folger “lives” compilation from the 1630s, presents a different readerly context, bringing 1 Henry IV together with Richard III, The Troublesome Raine of King John, Chapman’s Caesar and Pompey, Heywood’s Troubles of Queen Elizabeth, and other plays concerned with political figures and the (frequently vexed) maintenance of power. In this volume, we might speculate, the subversive energies of Falstaff and Eastcheap would be more easily eclipsed by the problem of succession and Henry’s tenuous control over his territories. Moreover, the Lambeth volume just discussed, assembled by the archepiscopal librarians, brings the play even further into the realm of ideological orthodoxy. In this case, the juxtaposition produced by binding texts together calls attention to two related themes that are central to Shakespeare’s 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 evil” (2.5)—would later emerge in print as sonnets 138 and 144, respectively. But here the extent to which anthological thinking guides our interpretations and the extent to which those interpretations can change in relation to different forms of assembly are unusually perceptible. Stripped of the familiar context of the Sonnets volume, the speaker’s lying “love” no longer denotes any one “mistress” figure but is free to take on shades of reference from this volume (aided perhaps in this case by the mention of an “untutored youth,” which conjures up Adonis, named only a few lines later).⁶¹ The range of potential transpositions, in other words, becomes broader with a new material context. This volume asks us to read sonnets 138 and 144 not in the sequence of poems that for us gives them meaning and a title but in a different textual assembly: one whose most prominent scene of courtship, iterated across multiple works, is Venus’s courtship of the boy.

A similar point can be made regarding the place of Lucrece in this volume. Modern critics, addressing the historical problem of Lucrece’s perceived moral dilemma, have tended to interpret the poem either implicitly or explicitly in the context of the Sonnets or that of Shakespeare’s classical sources. Nancy Vickers, in her magisterial reading, cites sonnet 106 and Shakespeare’s rejection of the poetics of praise, arguing that Lucrece exposes the violence of erotic description as it was practiced by male writers in the Petrarchan tradition.⁶² Jane O. Newman and others have similarly invoked Ovid’s Fasti and the tale of Philomela to show how Shakespeare departed from the convention of the vengeful rape victim, portraying Lucrece instead as a tragic sacrifice to a patriarchal power structure.⁶³ In both of these interpretive frameworks, Lucrece’s agency is minimal, present only in constitutive relation to male agency, whether sexual or political. But in a compilation where Lucrece is linked to other works by Shakespeare—works attentive to female agency (and indeed, impropriety) in figures like Venus and the “dark lady” of the two sonnets—a different protagonist, one whose will can be conceived outside the male power structure, is freer to emerge.