Notes on Shakespeare's Modern Collaborators -- Ch. 1

"The modern editor's most basic task is the accurate reproduction of the copy text on which subsequent, more complex editorial operations are based" (13).

There is a distinction between modernizing spelling and modernizing Shakespeare's language: the latter of these "is a travesty," but the former is common practice among all major editions of Shakespeare's works, and represents "a serious scholarly task" (13).

While early modern spellings, and perhaps pronunciations, could enable a single word to carry more than one meaning, both written and spoken English have become more distinct, and in most cases the duality of meaning is lost. While some critics suggest preserving original spellings to preserve this duality of meaning, modern readers are generally incapable of noticing dual meanings. The best practice for an editor of a modern spelling edition is therefore to choose the spelling and sense that seems more dominant, and gloss alternate meanings in a footnote (15 - 16).

"It seems clear that, contrary to modern punctuation, which is chiefly grammatical and logical, early modern punctuation was strongly rhetorical" (18).

While early modern punctuation clearly has meaning to its audiences, that meaning can be difficult to decipher. An editor's task in punctuating the text, therefore, is to try to communicate, as clearly as possible, the apparent intention of the original (18).

Following Gary Taylor's logic (c.f. "Inventing Shakespeare") that every editor reconstructs a text's author in his or her own image, every editor participates in the process of "authorial reconstruction" (20).

"When textual corruption of some kind seems beyond dispute, the exact form of emendation should take can be far from clear" (21).

Erne cites Mercutio's "We waste our lights in vaine, lights lights by day" as being a circumstance where emendation is necessary (21). I note this primarily because I disagree with it. Emendation may be possible, but the line, as printed carries with it performative possibilities for the actor, and the line as printed may therefore be exceptionally informative, although if left un-emended, it is worth a gloss.

"Clearly, it is hard to draw the line between what is and what is not desirable emendation, between legitimately fixing the text when it is broken and meddling with it in ways which seem unnecessary or downright harmful" (22).

Taylor opts for a more expansive and creative approach to emendation than most modern editors would take when he uses George Wilkins' The Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre to help rewrite the text of Pericles in a number of places (23).

Peter Blayney examined copies of the Folio in the Folger and determined that, what Jeanne Addison Roberts argued was an 'f' in 1978 ("so rare a wondered father and a (wise|wife)") was actually a blot of ink on a long s, and so returned to the reading as "wise" (24 - 25). I kind of want to see his evidence; I wonder if he took any pictures while examining it under 200x magnification. See his Arden 3 Tempest for more info.

Setting short lines together into a metrically regular line is a practice that has precedent in Ben Jonson's treatment of his own collected works, and while this sometimes couples lines that metrically and syntactically go together, and editor must be careful to not force lines together by meter when they are divided by sense (28).

c.f. Patricia Parker's "Altering the Letter of Twelfth Night: 'Some Are Born Great' and the Missing Signature," Shakespeare Survey, 59 (2006), 49 - 62.

Act and scene divisions in modern editions are largely a matter of editorial fancy; none of the playbooks printed in Shakespeare's life time contain act and scene divisions (34 - 35). We have elsewhere seen that the act and scene divisions in the Folio text are not uniform.

Scenes seem to have been the basic measure of dramatic unity, but Henslowe's Diary records writing plays by acts as early as the 1590s (35). Although as I have said before, if to my cast if not here, I don't think it fair to even attempt a guess at where the original act divisions in Merry Devil may be since the text is cut.

The "dominant consideration" for modern editors in determining a speech prefix is clarity of meaning, and while normalizing speech prefixes can subvert layers of meaning that a variation reflects, normalizing and expanding them will tend to produce a more readable text (39 - 40).

Summary


I'll leave off with Erne's words: Editing is "a task which requires considerable discrimination and can have important critical repercussions. Editors modernize and punctuate, name characters, determine who is present on stage, print speeches in prose or verse, choose specific words at the expense of others, even decide when a character is no longer a king - and in the process determine what constitutes Shakespeare's works" (42).

Citation


Erne, Lukas. Shakespeare's Modern Collaborator's. London: Continuum. 2008. Print.

Notes on "The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited"

Peter Blayney, in "The Publication of Playbooks" puts anachronisms of Pollard's anachronistic conceptions of piracy, good and bad quartos, and good and bad players and stationers to rest. It is a seminal article that represents a sea change in the way modern scholars considered the publication of Shakespeare's plays; while the New Bibliographers of Pollard's school considered the printing of playbooks a safe economic enterprise, Blayney's article effectively argues the opposite (2 - 3). I have Blayney's sequel to this article in my reading queue, but it sounds like I need to get my hands on the original.

By focusing on the relatively small number of playbooks printed in the STC (1.2%-1.6% of all STC entries between 1583 to 1642), Blayney reveals that playbooks were not a popular commodity, and that those playbooks that were printed did not sell very well (3).

Blayney's argument "is flawed at a fundamental level because it does not systematically compare the market performance of playbooks to that of other kinds of books." Popularity is a relative term, and Blayney did not examine the sale of playbooks within a sufficient context to establish this relative term. While Blayney's conclusions about piracy being a myth are true, the relative unpopularity of playbooks that he argues also turns out to be a myth (4).

The fact of an editions reprint is indicative that either the previous edition had sold out its run, or was about to, and that the publisher perceived sufficient demand to warrant a second printing (5).

Reprint rates do not reveal the number of copies bought and sold, nor the monetary investment in the publishing of an edition; Mark Bland in "The London Book-Trade in 1600" (A Companion to Shakespeare, David Scott Kastan, ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. p 450 - 463) (5).

"Judged by reprints, plays sold much better than the average book in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, much better even than sermons... Plays were, in fact, among the most successful books in which an early modern stationer could chose to invest" (6).

Charting market trends between 1576 and 1660 reveal that the market for playbooks can be divided into six distinct periods (these bullet points represent direct quotes from page 7):

• 1576 - 1597: an initial period of low production (48 first editions, 11 second-plus editions).
• 1598 - 1613: a boom followed by a sustained high production (129 first editions, 79 second-plus editions)
• 1614 - 1628: a gradual contraction, with production levels generally still above those of 1576 - 1597 (31 first editions, 65 second-plus editions)
• 1629 - 1640: a second boom (122 first editions, 84 second-plus editions)
• 1641 - 1649: a sharp contraction, with only one play published from 1643 - 1645 (17 first editions, 10 second-plus editions) [the article doesn't say so, but this period comprises the years of the first and second civil wars]
• 1650 - 1660: an expansion to levels slightly above those of 1614 - 1628 (58 first editions, 27 second-plus editions) 

London play houses were thriving long before there was a market for printed playbooks, and thus stage success does not necessarily correlate to or cause print success (10).

During the 1598 to 1613 boom, Stationers perceived enough of a demand that they were willing to invest in second and third editions of plays, perhaps partially, because, as Blayney points out in his seminal article, subsequent editions involved lower production costs than first editions did, and thus would yield higher profits if the market was sound (10). It's worth mentioning that the first and second quartos of Merry Devil were printed in this boom. 

"Numerous prefaces confirm that theatrical popularity was always one element of print popularity, and publishers often advertised a play's performance history on its title page" (11).

Reprints of an edition over time testify to the popularity of a play in print, and the demands of a reading public. While the subsequent performance on the stage remains a possibility, there is no evidence to establish correlation, let alone causation (11).

The market contraction for printed plays between 1614 and 1628 underscores the independence of the print and stage markets, but it is noteworthy that this contraction was primarily in the market for new plays: the rate of re-prints only experienced a small dip (11 - 12). Again, it is noteworthy that Q3 of Merry Devil was printed during this period. 

It is possible that either the demand for printed plays shrank in this period, and publishers reprinted old plays that had done well in anticipation that they might have similar success, but it is equally likely that the supply of new plays fell, and that stationers could not acquire manuscripts to new plays as easily as they could during the preceding boom period (12).

Reprints were the backbone of the market in printed plays, and their success would have been less dependent on the success of theatrical production (13).

The Jonson and Shakespeare Folios seem to have done less to establish the market for printed playbooks than the quarto reprints towards the end of the 1590s (13).

In treating primarily on the issue of piracy, Blayney has focussed primarily on newly printed play texts, and the distinction must be made: Blayney focussed on printed play texts and not play books, and thus includes plays printed in collection (13).

During the 1598 - 1613 expansion of the market, if counting only the market in speculative printing, which discounts state proclamations, visitation articles, university theses, and the like, the ratio of professional playbooks printed to other works is roughly 1 in 24 (14 - 16).

Monopolies on certain types of books, such as almanacs and Bibles, as well as captive audiences for law books and school books, meant that a large quantity of books in the STC were not printed in a speculative manner. Playbooks were risky and non-monopolistic in nature, and thus to determine their popularity it is necessary to evaluate a stationer's choice to print a playbook instead of one of the other types of books available to them (17).

"In the first expansion period, professional plays constituted 5.8 percent of this market, or about one in every seventeen editions; in their second expansion, they made up 5.0 percent of the market, or about one in every twenty editions. In peak years, about one in every eleven editions in this market was a professional play" (18).

"Early modern stationers tended to specialize in the kinds of books they published, playbooks included" (20).

In the overall book trade, "playbooks were clearly in high demand" (20 - 21).

While sermons were consistently printed more often than playbooks in the early modern period, playbooks were reprinted more than twice as often as sermons were (21).

Mucedorus was the best-selling play of the pre-Caroline period; it was reprinted 15 times by 1642 (21).

Whereas a sermon was highly unlikely to be reprinted at all if not within five years of its first edition, playbooks thrived well beyond this five year window. Only 2.4% of sermons were re-printed after five years, but 19.7% of plays were reprinted between 6 and 20 years after their first edition; even within this five year window, playbooks were reprinted at a rate of about 20.2%, which surpasses the rate for all speculative print books in the STC (22).

Outside of the 20 year window, the reprint rate for professional plays jumps to 48.6 percent (22).

"Plays not only repaid their publishers' investments more quickly than other books, but they also remained profitable for longer" (24).

Scholars have traditionally regarded playbooks as low-cost, low-profit, and high-risk investments, but if the largest volumes (such as the Geneva Bible) are discounted from the average length of printed books, playbooks are fairly typical in length. Given their popularity evident from re-print rates, and the long term profits those must have generated, printing playbooks was a middling-cost, middling-profit, low-risk venture, which would have made them attractive for speculators (25).

The relatively small number of printed playbooks might plausibly speak more to the available supply of play scripts than demand for new ones. The number of professional playbooks printed was of necessity determined by the number of plays performed on the professional stages. As the professional playing companies settled into established repertories, they had less of a need to commission new plays, which meant less new plays were available (26). It is also plausible that printers would have been most interested in printing plays that had been popular on the stage, as they would have come with their own customer base. While there may not have been enough facts to establish a correlation between print and stage popularity, it seems rational that, given the choice between printing a popular play and an unpopular one, one that had been "damned" on its opening, for example, a printer would have chosen to bet their money on the one that had already passed the trial of the public stage. That is certainly how they advertised it, anyway.

Summary

When viewing playbooks in the context of other speculative books printed in the early modern period, they appear to be a far less risky venture than some recent scholars, Blayney in particular, have suggested. While this does not imply a need to return to what Blayney describes as Pollard's "melodrama" of pirate players and printers, it means that we ought to view the printing of plays as both a good financial investment, and that we ought to examine the lack of new plays printed as an indication of a lack of supply rather than a lack of demand. 

Citation


Farmer, Alan B and Zachary Lesser. "The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited." Shakespeare Quarterly. Vol. 56, No. 1. Spring 2005. p 1 - 32.

Notes on Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor - Chapter 3

The quartos of Richard II, Richard III, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Much Ado printed by Andrew Wise represent ideal case studies to test the theory of McKerrow, Pollard, and Greg that Shakespeare had a direct hand in the preparation of his works for print. These texts are considered authoritative, and no publisher ever invested so heavily in printing Shakespeare's works while he was still alive. If Shakespeare worked with anyone for initial or subsequent printing of his plays, it would have been Wise (91).

Paul Werstine has demonstrated that both McKerrow's description of an 'author's original draft' and Greg's of 'foul papers' are 'a purely ideal form of printer's copy of which there are no examples among extant dramatic manuscripts' (91).

Greg and Pollard have conceived of an extremely linear path of transmission that led from the author's hand to the prompter's book to the printed form, but Gurr's argument that the written text existed in different states at different times, and served different purposes challenges this notion. Scott McMillan argues that transcriptions of performances were sometimes offered to patrons or given to printers; he supports this by noting Mosely's address to the reader in Beaumont and Fletcher's Comedies and Tragedies, which notes that "the Actours omitted some Scenes and Passages (with the Authour's consent) as occasion led them; and when private friends desir'd a Copy, they then (and justly too)transcribed what they Acted.  But now you have both All that was Acted, and all that was not" (92).

New Bibliography, generally speaking, attempts to streamline the process of print, which may cause New Bibliographers to overlook realities of print house practice: type setters were expected to faithfully reproduce the copy they were given, and paid more attention to the details of their craft than the dramatic action of the plays they were setting (94).

It is possible that an annotating reader, maybe Shakespeare or Wise himself, contributed annotations to the early printings of the Wise Quartos, such as the correction of a wrong speech prefix in Richard II (95).

Wise published Shakespeare's three best-selling quartos as his first three plays (Richard II, Richard III, 1 Henry IV); whether this was exceptional foresight or good luck, it has lead both Lukas Erne and Andrew Gurr to speculate that the Chamberlain's Men had a regular relationship with Wise, but his relationship may be stronger than either speculate; effectively making him the Chamberlain's first official publisher (95-98). 

Wise had no strong ties to the Stationer's Company, and in this way he was not unique among printers of plays during the period. Other printers, such as Thomas Millington and Richard Oliff, seem to have printed dramatic works only after coming into contact with a specific company or an agent of that company. Massai describes numerous other printers and stationers doing likewise (98-99). 

Most of the books Wise printed come from three authors: Thomas Nashe, Thomas Playfere, and William Shakespeare; all of whom were under the direct patronage of Sir George Carey, Earl of Hunsdon. It is likely that Wise had a connection with one of these three authors, and to have met the other two as a result of this connection, as patrons seldom had a personal hand in the printing of their company's works (100).

Revenues from selling a playbook for printing were small; Peter Blayney argues that companies may have sold their playbooks as a way of generating publicity for their performances. Printing playscripts was a means of advertisement (101). It sounds like I definitely need to look up this article in Shakespeare Quarterly.

"Substantive variants in speech prefixes, stage directions and dialogue in the second and third quartos of Richard II, Richard III, and 1 Henry IV suggest that they were corrected as they were repeatedly reprinted between 1598 and 1602" (102).

Emendations that require knowledge of the plot of a play are more realistically going to come from an annotating reader than a print-house typesetter (103). 

The publisher was as likely as the author to have a hand in emending manuscripts for print, and while it is possible that Shakespeare did take an interest in revising the Wise Quartos for subsequent printings, especially as his popularity was then peaking, he did so more like an annotating reader of the 16th century than as a revising author as E.A.J. Honigmann or Lukas Erne describe (105).

Summary

The Wise Quartos were both some of the earliest examples of Shakespeare's works in print, and some of the most successful. As these quartos were regularly reprinted, and as their reprints require knowledge of dramatic action, it is likely that an annotating reader had a hand in these revisions. Since the texts are considered authorial, these annotations were perhaps done either by Shakespeare himself, or with his approval, but that cannot be demonstrated, and even if it could, the annotations do not conform to New Bibliographical conceptions of an author revising their work.