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.
Showing posts with label annotations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label annotations. Show all posts
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Notes on Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor - Introduction
One of the authors Dr. Menzer recommended I look into when I started this project was Sonia Massai, and in what now feels like the pre-history days of last semester, I recall reading one of her articles on the matter (i.e. before I was taking obsessive compulsive notes. It's true, you never can read enough, but I definitely want to make a dent into Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor before I go much further. The inside cover claims this to be an exploration of the prehistory of editing, which is right up my alley.
While we might commonly mark Nicholas Rowe's 1709 edition of The Works of Mr. William Shakespeare as the beginning of editing Shakespeare's plays, and of giving a prominent place to the editor, "editorial manipulation" of the texts had been taking place for nearly a century by the time of Rowe's 1709 edition (1 - 2).
Julie Stone Peters has already explored the interplay between the playhouse and the print shop. The commercial possibilities of offering new texts that were, as commonly advertised on title pages of the period, "newly corrected and amended." It is, however, impossible to say what editorial principles guided these editions. While there is a lack of direct evidence to demonstrate how this process was done, there is some evidence, such as the stationer's preface in the second edition of the Comedies and Tragedies of Beaumont and Fletcher (3 - 4).
The process of manuscript annotations to a printed copy for subsequent printing was common enough that the verb "to perfect" came to mean not only "to complete," but also "to make faultless," and was specifically used in this latter context of the preparation of printers copy (5 - 6).
From George Whetstone's dedicatory epistle to Promos and Cassandra we know that texts commonly underwent a stage where they were considered imperfect and in need of correction before being printed. To this Richard Jones, the printer, adds another epistle to the reader explaining that Whetstone didn't supply him with a perfected copy of the work, and begs the indulgence of the reader in forgiving any errors he might have committed in the process. From this, we can see that, should the author have been unavailable, it was preferable that another party should undertake this task of "perfecting" the manuscript (6 - 7).
The final sentence of Heminge and Condell's dedicatory epistle of the First Folio clearly states that they have perfected the copies of the plays (or at least are taking responsibility for that) prior to their printing (7 - 8).
Mosley's collection of the works of Sir John Suckling offers a contrary example, where Mosely states in a preface that he has left The Sad One: A Tragedy un-perfected. Mosely found The Sad One to be incomplete, and decided to print it as he found it rather than supplement Suckling's works with another author unconnected to the original (8 - 9).
"While non-authorial completion or revision of an authoritative, though fragmentary, copy was increasingly regarded as detrimental tampering, non-authorial preparation of dramatic copy for the pres was valued both when it corrected a manuscript draft of a work which the author had failed to perfect and when it corrected imperfections which had found their way into earlier editions then used as printer's copy for later re-issues" (9 - 10).
Whether the original author was able to perfect their manuscript for print, or another agent was required, the perfection of the manuscript for the printer's copy was viewed as an essential part of the printing process (10).
Since the manuscript copies, perfected or otherwise, used to set playbooks for printing do not survive, we must look to the "patterns of textual variations" that occur in plays that were printed more than once, especially when those plays specifically advertise that they are revised or expanded on their title pages (10).
Changes to a text between printings which require some knowledge of that text are the mark of editorial and not print house influence. Print house practices required setters to pay attention to the spelling of words, punctuation, and proper italicization; printers were little concerned with spech prefixes or the use of the proper word within the context of the play (11 - 12).
Similarly, the play house practice of annotating printed texts tended to be towards the end of noting sound cues, cues indicating the use of a prop, a warning to a stage hand, or an indication that the stage would be cleared. They would not have changed/normalized speech prefixes unless doing so was related to a change in the stage action relative to the printed text (13). i.e. early modern prompters annotated scripts in much the same way that modern stage managers do.
The most common written annotations to printed playbooks in the early modern period included the addition or emendation of stage directions, the addition or emendation of speech prefixes, and the correction of nonsensical language in the dialogue. While individual corrections are almost impossible to date precisely, certain letters distinctive in 16th and 17th century secretary hand were no longer in common use by the end of the 18th century (14).
It is noteworthy that manuscript emendations to playbooks by private owners of those books were common, and indicates either a familiarity with the play as performed or with the greater narrative of the text (14 - 21).
Since it is difficult to trace the origins of manuscript emendations to printed playbooks, it is best to think of the individual who make these emendations as "annotating readers." Their emendations tend to demonstrate a familiarity with the text that goes beyond what would commonly be expected of print house practice, but neither their authorial or play house nature can be firmly established (30).
Methods of the New Bibliography devoted discovery the agency of a primary author do not mesh well with the emendations left behind by annotating readers. Since these readers cannot be connected with the authorial hand (or agents of the playhouse or publisher) in any meaningful way, the emendations that annotating readers have left behind will typically be disregarded by modern editors (31).
Modern editors may also discount emendations by annotating readers because they do not fit neatly into the model of removing print house corruptions in the service of illuminating authorial or theatrical intentions (31 - 32).
Many, if not most, stationers chose not to print plays for whatever reason, and it is likely that those who did had some connection with the playing companies. If this is the case, it is more likely than not that they would have had access to authorial manuscript copies of the plays they published (34).
Analysis
Unless I miss my guess, Massai is going to trace the lineage of Nicholas Rowe and those who came after him back to the annotating readers of the early modern era. She admits that she will have little direct evidence to proceed from, but does a fine job of establishing evidence that, some of the purchasers of his printed texts felt the need to correct those texts. The source of their correction is indeterminate; while it may likely be in performance, since we can only very approximately date the annotations, we have no way of knowing if this was a performance given in Shakespeare's lifetime, or if it was at the Globe, Blackfriars, or some private venue. One is also forced to accept the possibility that the source of some of these annotations may have been in the fancy of the annotator, but even if the emendation was routed in performance, we do not have the records necessary to corroborate whether or not the annotator was remembering properly.
Still, the tie between perfected copies being sent to the print house, and the link between stationers and the playhouse is useful. That said, while Arthur Johnson did possess one other King's Men play, he clearly didn't have significant dealings with them, but there exists a connection all the same. Alternatively, the case of the bad quartos is that they derived from pirated manuscripts from an actor in the company, and since the Host character figured prominently into the Merry Wives bad quarto, it has been assumed that this actor was involved in the piracy. If that is true, than we might be seeing something similar happening with Merry Devil since a Host character plays prominently in that play, too.
Maybe Merry Devil is a bad quarto, after all.
While we might commonly mark Nicholas Rowe's 1709 edition of The Works of Mr. William Shakespeare as the beginning of editing Shakespeare's plays, and of giving a prominent place to the editor, "editorial manipulation" of the texts had been taking place for nearly a century by the time of Rowe's 1709 edition (1 - 2).
Julie Stone Peters has already explored the interplay between the playhouse and the print shop. The commercial possibilities of offering new texts that were, as commonly advertised on title pages of the period, "newly corrected and amended." It is, however, impossible to say what editorial principles guided these editions. While there is a lack of direct evidence to demonstrate how this process was done, there is some evidence, such as the stationer's preface in the second edition of the Comedies and Tragedies of Beaumont and Fletcher (3 - 4).
The process of manuscript annotations to a printed copy for subsequent printing was common enough that the verb "to perfect" came to mean not only "to complete," but also "to make faultless," and was specifically used in this latter context of the preparation of printers copy (5 - 6).
From George Whetstone's dedicatory epistle to Promos and Cassandra we know that texts commonly underwent a stage where they were considered imperfect and in need of correction before being printed. To this Richard Jones, the printer, adds another epistle to the reader explaining that Whetstone didn't supply him with a perfected copy of the work, and begs the indulgence of the reader in forgiving any errors he might have committed in the process. From this, we can see that, should the author have been unavailable, it was preferable that another party should undertake this task of "perfecting" the manuscript (6 - 7).
The final sentence of Heminge and Condell's dedicatory epistle of the First Folio clearly states that they have perfected the copies of the plays (or at least are taking responsibility for that) prior to their printing (7 - 8).
Mosley's collection of the works of Sir John Suckling offers a contrary example, where Mosely states in a preface that he has left The Sad One: A Tragedy un-perfected. Mosely found The Sad One to be incomplete, and decided to print it as he found it rather than supplement Suckling's works with another author unconnected to the original (8 - 9).
"While non-authorial completion or revision of an authoritative, though fragmentary, copy was increasingly regarded as detrimental tampering, non-authorial preparation of dramatic copy for the pres was valued both when it corrected a manuscript draft of a work which the author had failed to perfect and when it corrected imperfections which had found their way into earlier editions then used as printer's copy for later re-issues" (9 - 10).
Whether the original author was able to perfect their manuscript for print, or another agent was required, the perfection of the manuscript for the printer's copy was viewed as an essential part of the printing process (10).
Since the manuscript copies, perfected or otherwise, used to set playbooks for printing do not survive, we must look to the "patterns of textual variations" that occur in plays that were printed more than once, especially when those plays specifically advertise that they are revised or expanded on their title pages (10).
Changes to a text between printings which require some knowledge of that text are the mark of editorial and not print house influence. Print house practices required setters to pay attention to the spelling of words, punctuation, and proper italicization; printers were little concerned with spech prefixes or the use of the proper word within the context of the play (11 - 12).
Similarly, the play house practice of annotating printed texts tended to be towards the end of noting sound cues, cues indicating the use of a prop, a warning to a stage hand, or an indication that the stage would be cleared. They would not have changed/normalized speech prefixes unless doing so was related to a change in the stage action relative to the printed text (13). i.e. early modern prompters annotated scripts in much the same way that modern stage managers do.
The most common written annotations to printed playbooks in the early modern period included the addition or emendation of stage directions, the addition or emendation of speech prefixes, and the correction of nonsensical language in the dialogue. While individual corrections are almost impossible to date precisely, certain letters distinctive in 16th and 17th century secretary hand were no longer in common use by the end of the 18th century (14).
It is noteworthy that manuscript emendations to playbooks by private owners of those books were common, and indicates either a familiarity with the play as performed or with the greater narrative of the text (14 - 21).
Since it is difficult to trace the origins of manuscript emendations to printed playbooks, it is best to think of the individual who make these emendations as "annotating readers." Their emendations tend to demonstrate a familiarity with the text that goes beyond what would commonly be expected of print house practice, but neither their authorial or play house nature can be firmly established (30).
Methods of the New Bibliography devoted discovery the agency of a primary author do not mesh well with the emendations left behind by annotating readers. Since these readers cannot be connected with the authorial hand (or agents of the playhouse or publisher) in any meaningful way, the emendations that annotating readers have left behind will typically be disregarded by modern editors (31).
Modern editors may also discount emendations by annotating readers because they do not fit neatly into the model of removing print house corruptions in the service of illuminating authorial or theatrical intentions (31 - 32).
Many, if not most, stationers chose not to print plays for whatever reason, and it is likely that those who did had some connection with the playing companies. If this is the case, it is more likely than not that they would have had access to authorial manuscript copies of the plays they published (34).
Analysis
Unless I miss my guess, Massai is going to trace the lineage of Nicholas Rowe and those who came after him back to the annotating readers of the early modern era. She admits that she will have little direct evidence to proceed from, but does a fine job of establishing evidence that, some of the purchasers of his printed texts felt the need to correct those texts. The source of their correction is indeterminate; while it may likely be in performance, since we can only very approximately date the annotations, we have no way of knowing if this was a performance given in Shakespeare's lifetime, or if it was at the Globe, Blackfriars, or some private venue. One is also forced to accept the possibility that the source of some of these annotations may have been in the fancy of the annotator, but even if the emendation was routed in performance, we do not have the records necessary to corroborate whether or not the annotator was remembering properly.
Still, the tie between perfected copies being sent to the print house, and the link between stationers and the playhouse is useful. That said, while Arthur Johnson did possess one other King's Men play, he clearly didn't have significant dealings with them, but there exists a connection all the same. Alternatively, the case of the bad quartos is that they derived from pirated manuscripts from an actor in the company, and since the Host character figured prominently into the Merry Wives bad quarto, it has been assumed that this actor was involved in the piracy. If that is true, than we might be seeing something similar happening with Merry Devil since a Host character plays prominently in that play, too.
Maybe Merry Devil is a bad quarto, after all.
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