c.f. Pollard's Shakespeare's Folios and Quartos.
When a dramatist sold their play to a playing company, they sold their rights along with their manuscript, and if they were, like Shakespeare, sharers in that company, they continued to own the play as sharers, but not as authors in the modern sense (18).
When a theatre wished to print a playbook, they would sell it, and the rights, to a stationer, who typically assumed all of the financial risks and publishing responsibilities, just as they would when any other author sold them a work to be printed (19).
"The notion that books not entered [in the Stationer's Register] must necessarily be surreptitious has long been abandoned" (22).
A bookseller might enter a work with the Stationer's Company to secure the job of printing it, but this theory does not account for the entry and transfer of the rights of Merry Wives by and from Busby to Johnson on 8 May 1605 as Busby was not a printer, and Johnson had the quarto printed by Thomas Creede. Pollard (Shakespeare's Folios and Quartos, 45) and Greg (The Library, 4th ser. xx (1940), 379) both hypothesized that the purchaser of the copy feared trouble and insisted on the procurer of the manuscript make the registry entry on the first instance (21). All of this only makes sense if you believe in the piracy and surreptitious printing practices, which I don't see a good argument for in light of the complete absence of legal action taken against such printing. This is, of course, significant, as this bad quarto Merry Wives is a cousin to Merry Devil.
Chambers speculates that the Lord Chamberlain's order of 1619 that none of the King's Men's plays should be printed without their permission in Shakespearean Stage i.136-137 (32). The idea is, apparently, older the Lukas Erne, but I still think Massai makes a strong argument for the logic behind the Pavier quartos.
Summary
Copyright, in the modern sense, did not exist in early modern London, and our evidence for the way printing rights were handled is thin. We have Stationer's records from which we can draw inferences, but the data that we do have does not give us sufficient information to determine how the relationships between stationers, printers, and playing companies functioned in any exact detail. We therefore must be cautious about interpreting that data with our own prejudices.
Showing posts with label Pavier Quartos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pavier Quartos. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Monday, December 27, 2010
Notes on "The Craft of Printing and the Publication of Shakespeare's Works - Chapter 4
Venus and Adonis is Shakespeare's first printed work, it was printed in 1593 by Richard Field ad sold by John Harrison. Field entered the poem in the Stationer's register on 18 April 1593. Shakespeare's second printed work was The Rape of Lucrece, also printed by Field and sold by Harrison; first printed in 1594, Lucrece was entered in the Stationer's register by Harrison on 9 May 1594. While there is no evidence that Shakespeare personally oversaw their printing, both are cleanly printed and appear to be set from the author's holograph. This same care and attention was not devoted to the printing of any other of Shakespeare's works during his lifetime (73 - 75).
Williams calls the Pavier quarto arrangement "higgledy-piggldy" (87). Most of his assessment of Shakespeare in print is a standard trope of New Bibliography; there are "bad quartos" which are pirated, "good quartos" that are attempts to correct the work of the author in print, and the Folio. Especially in light of Massai's analysis of the Pavier Quartos, I found Williams' description amusing.
The printers of the First Folio seem to have been playhouse and printshop professionals, but a more 'editorial' hand guided the Second Folio, which makes considered corrections and improvements to the text over F1. The Third and Fourth Folios were printed by men who were more typographically sensitive, the result culminating in the Fourth Folio which, unlike its predecessors, is a "handsome" volume patterned after continental printings, the quality of which outpaced the English (90 - 92 quotation from 90).
"It is true that [Shakespeare] wrote many more lines to his play than could be spoken in a production" (92).
Shakespeare wrote plays "from the joy and agony of writing, not to see them appear printed on pages in a book" (93). Wow. In the same breath that Williams says Shakespeare wrote more lines than would actually be performed, he also says that Shakespeare wrote them because he was a Writer. Here we see the flaw of the New Bibliography in action: the understanding of Shakespeare as a writer in the purely artistic sense. Only a fictional character could be so dedicated to the production of words for the sake of words. Shakespeare was a man of the playhouse, and too prodigious a businessman to waste time writing words that he never expected to be read or performed.
Summary
The New Bibliographers have a rather consistent narrative of the history of William Shakespeare's plays in print, and a view of Shakespeare as a pure author who was interested in writing beautiful words for the sake of beauty. They are also persistent in ignoring or disregarding evidence to the contrary. Williams has clearly fixed himself in that tradition in this last chapter, and despite a book filled with otherwise interesting historical data about the rise of print, comes to a rather blase conclusion.
Citation
Williams, George Walton. The Craft of Printing and the Publication of Shakespeare's Works. Washington: Folger Books. 1985. Print.
Williams calls the Pavier quarto arrangement "higgledy-piggldy" (87). Most of his assessment of Shakespeare in print is a standard trope of New Bibliography; there are "bad quartos" which are pirated, "good quartos" that are attempts to correct the work of the author in print, and the Folio. Especially in light of Massai's analysis of the Pavier Quartos, I found Williams' description amusing.
The printers of the First Folio seem to have been playhouse and printshop professionals, but a more 'editorial' hand guided the Second Folio, which makes considered corrections and improvements to the text over F1. The Third and Fourth Folios were printed by men who were more typographically sensitive, the result culminating in the Fourth Folio which, unlike its predecessors, is a "handsome" volume patterned after continental printings, the quality of which outpaced the English (90 - 92 quotation from 90).
"It is true that [Shakespeare] wrote many more lines to his play than could be spoken in a production" (92).
Shakespeare wrote plays "from the joy and agony of writing, not to see them appear printed on pages in a book" (93). Wow. In the same breath that Williams says Shakespeare wrote more lines than would actually be performed, he also says that Shakespeare wrote them because he was a Writer. Here we see the flaw of the New Bibliography in action: the understanding of Shakespeare as a writer in the purely artistic sense. Only a fictional character could be so dedicated to the production of words for the sake of words. Shakespeare was a man of the playhouse, and too prodigious a businessman to waste time writing words that he never expected to be read or performed.
Summary
The New Bibliographers have a rather consistent narrative of the history of William Shakespeare's plays in print, and a view of Shakespeare as a pure author who was interested in writing beautiful words for the sake of beauty. They are also persistent in ignoring or disregarding evidence to the contrary. Williams has clearly fixed himself in that tradition in this last chapter, and despite a book filled with otherwise interesting historical data about the rise of print, comes to a rather blase conclusion.
Citation
Williams, George Walton. The Craft of Printing and the Publication of Shakespeare's Works. Washington: Folger Books. 1985. Print.
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Notes on Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor - Chapter 4
Most of us know the story that the Lord Chamberlain forced the Stationers Company to forbid their members from printing the King's Men's plays without their permission, and that this injunction was specifically focussed against Thomas Pavier. Pavier printed several of Shakespeare's quartos, and most scholars would agree that Heminge and Condell wanted to shut him down in anticipation of their Folio project. Lukas Erne has suggested that the 'surreptitious copies' that Heminge and Condell attack in the preface were the Pavier Quartos, as opposed to the "bad quartos" as Pollard suggested. Scholars will commonly cite the forged imprints that appear on six of Pavier's eight quartos as proof of his attempts to get around this order (106).
Massai believes that Pavier was motivated by business considerations and not the Stationer's Co order when he forged the imprints. She further proposes that it was Isaac Jaggard and not the King's Men that conceived of the idea for the Folio, based on his experience printing the Pavier collection; the King's Men used the Stationer's Co order to dissuade other Stationers from buying Shakespeare's plays, and persuaded Pavier to print the quartos he had individually as a means to whet consumer appetite for the Folio (106 - 107).
Among the irregularities that Massai's proposed narrative of events accounts for is the fact that annotated copies of Paviers Midsummer and possibly King Lear were used for the Folio, which seems to suggest that Heminge and Condell did not view these as 'maimed and deformed' copies. Also, there seems to be a complete lack of retaliation against Pavier, and maybe most tellingly, the Jaggard's were called upon to lead the syndicate that printed the Folio (108).
All three Lords Chamberlain who held that office before the closing of the theatres in 1642 wrote letters to forbid the printing of plays produced by court-patronized companies. William Herbert's 1619 letter does not survive, but Philip Herbert's 10 June 1637 and Robert Devereux's 7 August 1641 letter both do, and both invoke William Herbert's letter as precedent (109).
Philip Herbert's letter specifies that King's Men actors must authorize the printing of any already or yet to be registered play in writing, but does not allow for the already printed editions of the plays to be re-issued, and does not prevent their sale (109).
Neither Philip Herbert's 1637 letter, nor Devereux's 1641 letter supports Greg's assumption that playing companies considered the reprinting of old plays to be a financial liability or an infringement of their proprietary rights (110).
"A conservative analysis of the pattern of dramatic publication during the five-year periods preceding and following the Lord Chamberains' letters of 1619 and 1637 confirms that the order issued by the Court of the Stationers' Company in 1619 was a precautionary rather than a cautionary measure" (110).
Philip Herbert's 1637 injunction can be viewed as a cautionary measure, as the printing of plays increased during this time; Thomas Heywood, in his preface to The English Traveller, accuses the actors of "think[ing] it against their peculiar profit to have [his plays] come into Print," but appears to have found a printer anyway. The 1619 and 1641 letters, by contrast, followed a period of noticeable decline in the printing of play texts (111).
By the time of the Lord Chamberlain's injunction in 1619, Pavier was an established member of the Stationer's Company, and it is unlikely he would have defied their order and printed contraband books (113).
Pavier's Merry Wives, though attributed to Arthur Johnson, is correctly dated (Johnson's edition was printed in 1602), and Johnson was still active in 1619. It is unlikely that this represents an attempt to pass off the new printing as an old one, and Johnson could have taken action against Pavier within the Stationer's Company if he felt his rights were being infringed (113).
Pavier is unlikely to have pirated the quartos he printed because he owned the rights to five of them, probably worked with the stationers who owned the rights to three, and the remaining two had not been reclaimed by their stationers since 1600 (114).
Perhaps more significant are the errors on the printed dates for Pavier's Henry V and Sir John Oldcastle, which establish their print dates as 1608 and 1600 respectively; Pavier personally owned the rights to both of these plays (1614).
Since all of the quartos that Pavier printed had been printed before, the King's Men actors had no legal recourse to stop Pavier from printing them (114).
Other nonce collections of plays printed in the period demonstrate similar false impressions on their title pages; this had the effect of presenting the collection as a new collection of older works previously printed elsewhere (115 - 116).
Jaggard may have persuaded Pavier to print his collection of quartos as a nonce collection of a recently deceased playwright rather than as an incomplete collection of works because collections of plays printed for the public stage were notoriously bad sellers. The appearance of a nonce collection might have catered to new market appeal, while at the same time whetting the market appetite for the Folio. Selling the quartos in this manner would have minimized Pavier's financial risk, but he stood to profit from the Folio because he did own the copyright to five of the plays, and would have been able to make money by letting that to other stationers. It is also possible that Pavier planned on being a member of the Folio syndicate, and was thinking of long term Folio profits as well; there are many reasons why he might have agreed to Jaggard's plan (118 - 119).
Twentieth century editors of the plays Pavier printed will tend to agree that Pavier consulted no new sources, but that his quartos were nevertheless heavily edited; these edits tend to correct errors from previous printings, especially in terms of speech prefixes, and to add stage directions to increase dramatic action for a reader, while removing stage directions that would be more useful for an actor (121-123).
Stage directions in the Pavier quartos tend to be set in such a way as to make them more easily readable. They are frequently surrounded by a newline to help make them more visually distinct from surrounding text, as opposed to being set flush right after one or more lines of text, as in the case of the printings from which Pavier's quartos were set (125).
The dialogue in Pavier's quartos is similarly well-tended. Lines are often re-written to correct factual errors, "to introduce or record changes in the dramatic structure of the play," or to correct passages that were corrupt in the source text (125).
Massai says of the Pavier quartos: "The more problematic the source text, the greater the frequency with which either a careful annotating reader or an alert compositor turned their attention to local errors" (129).
Pavier was undertaking a new venture in printing a collection of plays for the public stage, and it is worth considering that he may have invested his time in perfecting the texts for print just as he invested his capital in the print process. Pavier himself may have been the annotating reader responsible for corrections to the texts that appear in his quartos, and while it is impossible to establish his identity solely from internal evidence, his previous output would suggest that Pavier is a likely candidate (132 - 133).
Conclusion
While some modern scholars have regarded Pavier and his publishing venture as an expansion of the piracy of the "bad" quartos, just as we have re-evaluated both the piracy and the badness of those earlier quartos, we ought to at least re-evaluate Pavier. He was an established member of his company, and an analysis of his output over the course of his career shows that he was attentive to details and interested in the quality of the works that he printed. While he may not have consulted authoritative sources, he was interested in translating the action of a playscript into a format more conducive to be read as an end in itself. Far from being the originator of maimed, deformed, and surreptitious, copy, Pavier may have been one of the originators of an editorial tradition that continue to this day.
Massai believes that Pavier was motivated by business considerations and not the Stationer's Co order when he forged the imprints. She further proposes that it was Isaac Jaggard and not the King's Men that conceived of the idea for the Folio, based on his experience printing the Pavier collection; the King's Men used the Stationer's Co order to dissuade other Stationers from buying Shakespeare's plays, and persuaded Pavier to print the quartos he had individually as a means to whet consumer appetite for the Folio (106 - 107).
Among the irregularities that Massai's proposed narrative of events accounts for is the fact that annotated copies of Paviers Midsummer and possibly King Lear were used for the Folio, which seems to suggest that Heminge and Condell did not view these as 'maimed and deformed' copies. Also, there seems to be a complete lack of retaliation against Pavier, and maybe most tellingly, the Jaggard's were called upon to lead the syndicate that printed the Folio (108).
All three Lords Chamberlain who held that office before the closing of the theatres in 1642 wrote letters to forbid the printing of plays produced by court-patronized companies. William Herbert's 1619 letter does not survive, but Philip Herbert's 10 June 1637 and Robert Devereux's 7 August 1641 letter both do, and both invoke William Herbert's letter as precedent (109).
Philip Herbert's letter specifies that King's Men actors must authorize the printing of any already or yet to be registered play in writing, but does not allow for the already printed editions of the plays to be re-issued, and does not prevent their sale (109).
Neither Philip Herbert's 1637 letter, nor Devereux's 1641 letter supports Greg's assumption that playing companies considered the reprinting of old plays to be a financial liability or an infringement of their proprietary rights (110).
"A conservative analysis of the pattern of dramatic publication during the five-year periods preceding and following the Lord Chamberains' letters of 1619 and 1637 confirms that the order issued by the Court of the Stationers' Company in 1619 was a precautionary rather than a cautionary measure" (110).
Philip Herbert's 1637 injunction can be viewed as a cautionary measure, as the printing of plays increased during this time; Thomas Heywood, in his preface to The English Traveller, accuses the actors of "think[ing] it against their peculiar profit to have [his plays] come into Print," but appears to have found a printer anyway. The 1619 and 1641 letters, by contrast, followed a period of noticeable decline in the printing of play texts (111).
By the time of the Lord Chamberlain's injunction in 1619, Pavier was an established member of the Stationer's Company, and it is unlikely he would have defied their order and printed contraband books (113).
Pavier's Merry Wives, though attributed to Arthur Johnson, is correctly dated (Johnson's edition was printed in 1602), and Johnson was still active in 1619. It is unlikely that this represents an attempt to pass off the new printing as an old one, and Johnson could have taken action against Pavier within the Stationer's Company if he felt his rights were being infringed (113).
Pavier is unlikely to have pirated the quartos he printed because he owned the rights to five of them, probably worked with the stationers who owned the rights to three, and the remaining two had not been reclaimed by their stationers since 1600 (114).
Perhaps more significant are the errors on the printed dates for Pavier's Henry V and Sir John Oldcastle, which establish their print dates as 1608 and 1600 respectively; Pavier personally owned the rights to both of these plays (1614).
Since all of the quartos that Pavier printed had been printed before, the King's Men actors had no legal recourse to stop Pavier from printing them (114).
Other nonce collections of plays printed in the period demonstrate similar false impressions on their title pages; this had the effect of presenting the collection as a new collection of older works previously printed elsewhere (115 - 116).
Jaggard may have persuaded Pavier to print his collection of quartos as a nonce collection of a recently deceased playwright rather than as an incomplete collection of works because collections of plays printed for the public stage were notoriously bad sellers. The appearance of a nonce collection might have catered to new market appeal, while at the same time whetting the market appetite for the Folio. Selling the quartos in this manner would have minimized Pavier's financial risk, but he stood to profit from the Folio because he did own the copyright to five of the plays, and would have been able to make money by letting that to other stationers. It is also possible that Pavier planned on being a member of the Folio syndicate, and was thinking of long term Folio profits as well; there are many reasons why he might have agreed to Jaggard's plan (118 - 119).
Twentieth century editors of the plays Pavier printed will tend to agree that Pavier consulted no new sources, but that his quartos were nevertheless heavily edited; these edits tend to correct errors from previous printings, especially in terms of speech prefixes, and to add stage directions to increase dramatic action for a reader, while removing stage directions that would be more useful for an actor (121-123).
Stage directions in the Pavier quartos tend to be set in such a way as to make them more easily readable. They are frequently surrounded by a newline to help make them more visually distinct from surrounding text, as opposed to being set flush right after one or more lines of text, as in the case of the printings from which Pavier's quartos were set (125).
The dialogue in Pavier's quartos is similarly well-tended. Lines are often re-written to correct factual errors, "to introduce or record changes in the dramatic structure of the play," or to correct passages that were corrupt in the source text (125).
Massai says of the Pavier quartos: "The more problematic the source text, the greater the frequency with which either a careful annotating reader or an alert compositor turned their attention to local errors" (129).
Pavier was undertaking a new venture in printing a collection of plays for the public stage, and it is worth considering that he may have invested his time in perfecting the texts for print just as he invested his capital in the print process. Pavier himself may have been the annotating reader responsible for corrections to the texts that appear in his quartos, and while it is impossible to establish his identity solely from internal evidence, his previous output would suggest that Pavier is a likely candidate (132 - 133).
Conclusion
While some modern scholars have regarded Pavier and his publishing venture as an expansion of the piracy of the "bad" quartos, just as we have re-evaluated both the piracy and the badness of those earlier quartos, we ought to at least re-evaluate Pavier. He was an established member of his company, and an analysis of his output over the course of his career shows that he was attentive to details and interested in the quality of the works that he printed. While he may not have consulted authoritative sources, he was interested in translating the action of a playscript into a format more conducive to be read as an end in itself. Far from being the originator of maimed, deformed, and surreptitious, copy, Pavier may have been one of the originators of an editorial tradition that continue to this day.
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