The Shakespeare Thefts (17 page)

The master printer would decide whether the text would be set into type by a single typesetter, called a compositor, or by a number working simultaneously. Compositors often introduced changes in spelling and punctuation and occasionally made substantive emendations as well. According to Joseph Moxon’s seventeenth-century treatise on the art of printing, the compositor could be expected to “read his copy with consideration; so that he may get himself into the meaning of the
Author
.” Thus enlightened, the compositor would be able
to “discern … where the author has been deficient” and “amend” his copy accordingly.

The compositor would set individual lines of handmade metal type in a “composing stick,” a small handheld tray about the width of a line of type. He would transfer these to a “galley”—a larger tray the size of a page—and then transfer his galleys to the imposing stone, where they would be positioned to make up a “forme.” The pages that fill either side of one sheet constitute one forme. The pages that will lie on the inside of the sheet when it is folded are the inner forme; those on the outside, the outer forme. When the forme was completed, it would be tightly wedged into an iron frame and delivered to the pressman, who would place it on the bed of the press. While one pressman inked the type in the forme, another placed a sheet of slightly dampened paper on a hinged frame covered with parchment, the “tympan.” The tympan was then folded over the type and rolled under the upper plate of the press, the “platen.” The pressman pulled on the bar, causing the platen to press the tympan onto the inked type. A proof sheet would be pulled and read against the manuscript by a “corrector.” (In smaller printing houses that could not afford to retain a full-time corrector, the owner often assumed responsibility for proofreading.) Any necessary corrections would then be made in the metal type. The first sheets of a print run might be provided to reassure
the corrector that the changes had indeed been implemented; often these would be checked as the rest were being printed, resulting in books that were made up of sheets in different states of correction.

A single press could print about 250 sheets per hour. If an edition consisted of a thousand copies, the pressmen could print one side of a sheet in the morning and then print the other in the afternoon while the pages were still wet. When all sheets of the book had been printed and dried, they were ready to be folded and collated for binding. Generally, however, only a few books were bound, usually to be used as display copies. The remainder were warehoused as sheets to be distributed to retail booksellers. Any bookseller who belonged to the Stationers’ Company could purchase books published in London at controlled wholesale prices from other company members.

Although the trade in printed plays was a relatively small part of the bookselling business, play quartos were printed in substantial numbers to satisfy the reading audience of the early seventeenth century: A contemporary observed that “our quarto-playbooks have come forth in such abundance, and found so many customers, that they almost exceed all number, one study being scarce able to hold them, and two years time too little to peruse them all.”
²
Play quartos usually were sold without bindings, although readers who had collected a number
of dramatic quartos might have them bound as a single volume.

About half of Shakespeare’s plays had appeared in quarto, but eighteen appear for the first time in the First Folio:
The Tempest, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Measure for Measure, The Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, All’s Well That Ends Well, Twelfth Night, King John, Henry VI, Part 1, Henry VIII, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline, The Taming of the Shrew
, and
The Winter’s Tale
. We know very little about the planning stages of the First Folio. Perhaps Shakespeare’s friends and fellow actors in the King’s Men—chief among them John Heminges and Henry Condell (who, along with Richard Burbage, were the only actors mentioned in Shakespeare’s will)—were planning an authorized collection of his plays when they got wind of publisher Thomas Pavier’s plans to bring out an unauthorized collection in 1619, or perhaps they got the idea from Pavier. In their epistle “To the great Variety of Readers,” Heminges and Condell describe their task:

It has been a thing, we confess, worthy to have been wished, that the author himself had lived to have set forth and overseen his own writings. But since it hath been ordained otherwise, and he by death departed from that right, we pray you do not envy his friends, the office of their care, and pain, to have collected and published them.

A syndicate of publishers was at some point formed to underwrite the venture. The colophon on the last page of the First Folio is unusual in that it emphasizes the financial costs of the undertaking: “
Printed at the Charges of W. Jaggard, Ed. Blount, J. Smithweeke, and W. Aspley, 1623
.” William Jaggard, who had published nine Shakespeare quartos in 1619 for Pavier’s projected collection, had no doubt accumulated the copyrights to plays that had been printed earlier, a vital component for the production of the folio. John Smethwick probably was invited to join the cartel because he held the rights to
Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Love’s Labour’s Lost
, and
The Taming of the Shrew
. Similarly, William Aspley held the rights to
2 Henry IV
and
Much Ado About Nothing
.

The title page misleadingly claims that the book was “printed by Isaac Jaggard, and Ed. Blount.” However, Blount was only a publisher; the printing of the folio was done entirely in the Jaggard shop. Charlton Hinman’s monumental analysis of the printing of the First Folio identified five typesetters at work on that text (Compositors A, B, C, D, and E) by their idiosyncratic spelling preferences.
³
Once particular compositors have been identified and their shares of the book have been established, textual scholars often are able to characterize individual compositors’ working habits. Compositor E, for instance, appears to have been an inexperienced workman, probably a seventeen-year-old apprentice named John Leason
who joined the Jaggard shop in November 1622. Leason was prone to making such foolish errors as “terrible woer” for “treble woe.” Compositor B, however, seems to have made intentional changes when his copy did not make sense to him, such as the alteration of the “life-rendering Pelican” (according to legend, a mother pelican would pierce its own breast in order to feed its young with its blood) to “life-rendering Politician”(!).

A compositor would attempt to calculate in advance how much of his copy would be needed to fill each printed page (so that pages 1 and 4 of a folio, which would be on the same side of the sheet, could be typeset and sent to the press before pages 2 and 3, which would be on the other side of the sheet). Compositors who made errors in their calculations would reach the end of their stints with too little or too much copy and be forced to fill out or contract the page using such expedients as setting prose as verse or vice versa. This seems to be the case at the foot of the page at the end of one of Compositor B’s stints in
Hamlet
, where four lines of prose are set as eleven lines of quasi-verse.

William Jaggard was not known in the period to be a careful printer. Indeed, some authors complained about the frequency of typographic errors in books from his printing shop. Thomas Heywood claims that Jaggard’s refusal to include an errata slip in
Troia Britanica
(1609) was calculated to place “fault upon the
neck of the author.” The printing shop’s errors may be attributed to Jaggard’s failing eyesight, probably a result of a sexually transmitted disease and its treatment. His son Isaac no doubt assumed increasing responsibilities for the family business as his father’s blindness progressed.

The printing of the 908-page First Folio began early in 1622 and took nearly two years to complete. William died before it was published. He is named on the colophon as one of the publishers, while Isaac is named on the title page as the printer.

Heminges and Condell divided the plays into the generic categories of the volume’s title—
Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies—
and apparently exercised some care in ordering the plays so that each section begins and ends with plays that had not previously appeared in quarto. The only exception to this rule is
Troilus and Cressida
, the first page of which was initially printed on the verso of the last page of
Romeo and Juliet
, in the middle of the tragedies section; the text was then reset and re-placed to come first among the tragedies—
or
last among the histories; the play is not listed on the folio’s table of contents. Thus it is not clear to which category the play belongs. Heminges and Condell seem to have made a conscious decision not to include Shakespeare’s poems in the collection, and they may have intentionally
omitted some of the late collaborative plays, such as
Pericles, Cardenio
(now lost), and
The Two Noble Kinsmen
.

The First Folio title page advertises the plays within as “Published according to the True Original Copies.” The term “original” apparently meant the authoritative copy used in the theater, the “book” of the play. Shakespeare’s fellow actors obviously would have had access to such playbooks, which would no doubt have been marked up by the acting company’s prompter, or “book-holder.” There are many more directions for stage action in the folio text of the plays than in the quarto versions. In the climactic fight scene in
Hamlet
, for instance, the folio includes seven essential stage directions that do not appear in the earlier quarto version of the play, including
They play
[i.e., they begin the swordfight],
In the scuffling they change rapiers
[so that Hamlet now holds the poison-tipped sword, with which he then]
Hurts the King
and the
King Dyes
, immediately after which Laertes
Dyes
and then Hamlet
Dyes
, making the death-groan: “O, o, o, o.”

The First Folio was expected to be on the market by mid-1622; it was included in the Frankfurt Book Fair’s catalog as one of the books printed between April 1622 and October 1622. However, the folio did not actually appear until very late in 1623. On November 8, 1623,
Blount and Isaac Jaggard entered in the Stationers’ Register their copyrights to the plays that had not been published previously.

Some scholars have argued that the First Folio was a runaway success, with demand being so great that a second edition was required within less than a decade. In 1632, Thomas Cotes, who had taken over the Jaggard shop following Isaac’s death in 1627, printed the Second Folio for a syndicate of publishers that again included Smethwick and Aspley. (Ben Jonson’s folio, by contrast, took twenty-four years before a second printing was necessary.) However, other scholars maintain that the First Folio was a financial disaster that bankrupted Blount, who published nothing in the five years following the folio’s publication in 1623 and ultimately had to sell both his bookshop and his rights in Shakespeare’s plays. An oddly sad paradox that one of the publishers of one of the most valuable books in the history of printing may have ended up in the poorhouse.

When I was three years old, my parents bought a Pontiac Tempest, which my mother named “Miranda,” and thus my fate to become a Shakespearean was sealed. For which I should like to record my profoundest debt of gratitude to my mother, Margaret Rasmussen, and my late father, Carl Rasmussen.

I have the enormous good fortune of having a family with whom I share everything and without whom I could not imagine anything. Vicky, Tristan, and Arden, this book is dedicated to you, as am I.

To my friends and colleagues, I am delighted to express my thanks, and thanks, and thanks again:

To Arthur Evenchik, for editing everything I’ve written over the last three decades and making my writing more nuanced and perspicacious than it has any right to be. To Sam Burridge, the best publisher in the business and the driving force behind this book, for having more faith in me than I had in myself. To Allison McCabe, the best editor in the business, for finding my voice. To the best research team ever assembled: Donald L. Bailey, Mark Farnsworth, Lara Hansen, Trey Jansen, and Sarah Stewart. (Further appreciations for each of your contributions are recorded within.) To Anthony James West, for blazing the trail, for the Reform Club, and for Wimbledon. And to my editors and publishers at Palgrave, first Airié Stuart and Alessandra Bastagli, and then Luba Ostashevsky, Isobel Scott, and Debra Manette for trenchant encouragement throughout.

To James Shapiro, for the secret of writing a successful trade book. (According to Jim: Assemble a group of college-educated but nonspecialist readers, have them read everything that you write, and if they don’t understand anything, rewrite it until they do.) To my superlative group of initial readers, Emilie Meyer (who currently digs prose—a genuinely
inside
joke), Eric Waldschmidt (who found these narratives to be mind-altering), and Robert Lerner (who may yet perfect the “finesse move”), a simple “thanks” cannot begin to express
my gratitude for what you have brought to this project and for what you have taught me.

To David Bevington and Richard Strier,
alumnus olim, aeternum amicus
. To Lars Engle, for the Sven diagram. (Leif didn’t fall far from the tree.) To Doug Bruster, for saving the rest of us from embarrassment by generally keeping his six-pack abs under wraps. To Sonia Massai, for splendidly revealing her pregnancy when faced with Lebanese raw lamb and for insisting that the red Christie’s bag could not be taken on the tube. To Gordon McMullan, for transporting (not to say smuggling) an early folio over the Atlantic in his carry-on luggage (and to Mac, Lars, and James for ensuring that it wasn’t desecrated with ’49 Lynch Bages). To Tiffany Stern (“Epiphany Stern” to her friends), for her long hours spent transcribing Elizabethan manuscripts at my dining room table and for having the characteristic good grace not to crash in Rick Michaelson’s plane. To Rick Michaelson, for pilcrows in Oxford and Cambridge, and for not crashing with Tiffany.