"Booksellers were often publishers, and publishers were often printers" (435).
Publishers tended to specialize in the kinds of materials they published, but printers tended not to, although there were some notable exceptions. Thomas East was known for printing music, and William Jaggard for heraldry, although neither of these printers confined themselves strictly to their respective materials (435 - 436).
"Many authors did not prepare their manuscripts for the press, and, on several occasions, their texts were printed without their knowledge" (438).
The German medical student and sometime proofreader Hieronymus Hornshuch complained that "it is particularly bothersome if someone submits his writings to their press not neatly written" (439). Henry Chettle's explanation that Greene's handwriting in Groatsworth of Wit was difficult to read, and thus Chettle transcribed Greene's manuscript himself (439). Thomas Heywood asks the reader to excuse the compositor at the end of The Exemplary lives and Memorable Acts of Nine the Most Worthy Women for setting type from a manuscript "coppy in a difficult and unacquainted hand" (439). These three testimonials offer evidence that not every manuscript was perfected before being submitted to the printer.
Moxon's description of proof reading was a three stage process, and while he is to some extent describing an ideal printshop, Moxon was himself a printer, and his descriptions of this practice are ikely at least partially based in his experience (443).
Heywood complains in Exemplary Lives of having to include an errata list because the "corrector... could not bee always ready in regard of some necessary employment" (443).
Topsell admits in the introductory epistle to his History of Serpents that numerous errors in his previous book, Four-footed Beasts were present because he and the publisher "were not so thoroughly estated as to maintaine a sufficient scholler to attend only upon the presse" (443).
"That it was usual for authors to correct proofs is indicated by the apologies for their failure to do so" (443).
Proof reading is unquantifiable, but the evidence of printed texts suggests that it was common practice, and according to Moxon the print shop corrector was assisted by a reader who read aloud from the manuscript (444).
Proofreading was undertaken to correct mechanical errors, such as wide white spaces, unlinked white spaces, ink splotches, and misaligned type (444).
Citation
Maguire, Laurie E. "The Craft of Printing (1600)." A Companion to Shakespeare. David Scott Kastan Ed. Malden: Blackwell. 1999. p 434 - 449. Print.
Showing posts with label printing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label printing. Show all posts
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Monday, December 27, 2010
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):
Citation
Farmer, Alan B and Zachary Lesser. "The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited." Shakespeare Quarterly. Vol. 56, No. 1. Spring 2005. p 1 - 32.
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.
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Notes on "The Craft of Printing and the Publication of Shakespeare's Works - Chapter 1
On the heels of Massai's work, and in the wake of McKerrow's speech, I'm continuing my readings on Shakespeare in print with George Walton Williams' The Craft of Printing and the Publication of Shakespeare's Works. Lacking Shakespeare's papers, we can only view his works through print, but Shakespeare in print was a product of the intramural collaborations of the early modern playhouse and and print house, and the collaboration between these two highly collaborative worlds. I'm hoping Williams' book will give me a little bit more insight into the print house world.
This first chapter is titled "The Invention of Printing."
The renaissance mind thought of printing as a way of conquering time. The earliest depiction of a printing press is in the 1499 La grant dans macabre, published in Lyons, shows three figures of death taking a compositor, a pressman, and a bookseller performing their work. Likewise, a 1567 French illustration (printed in Poitiers) of a printing press in La Fauconnerie de messire Arthelouche contains two mottoes: vitam mortuo reddo ("I restore life from death") and je ravie le mort ("I despoil death") (15).
The 1578 Book of Christian Prayers contains the motto "We Printers wrote with wisedome's pen: / She lives for aye, we die as men." (15).
Prior to the development of the printing press, books were transmitted through copies created by scribes one word at a time. A form of mass production of texts was possible with a single individual reading aloud from a book while multiple scribes write down what they hear. Either of these forms of textual transmission were slow, tedious, costly, and subject to human error. The time and monetary cost involved limited the production of books to those that were of special importance or significance to the producers (19).
"Though it is easy to say that Gutenberg invented printing, it is not so easy to define what that invention actually was; for the invention of printing depended not on the contrivance of a single mechanical device but on the development of several devices, techniques, and elements and on the synthesis of them all" (20).
The idea of movable type existed before Gutenberg, but he invented a practical process for doing so (20 - 21).
The earliest printed document from Gutenberg's print shop is a Papal Indulgence from 1454; other early works include selections from school books, calendars, and scraps of poetry (21).
In November of 1455, Johannes Fust, Gutenberg's financier, foreclosed on the print shop, which continued operation without Gutenberg and printed the "Gutenberg Bible" in 1455 or early 1456 (21).
Between 1450 - 1500, the first 50 years of printing, more than 8 million books were printed in Western Europe, roughly 1/3 of them illustrated. This level of book production was unprecedented in the history of the world (23).
On 9 August 1516, a scholarly collector in Bologna wrote to a book seller in Leipzig -- 500 miles away, over the Alps and across a national boundary -- to order a book; he received the book less than 2 weeks later on 22 August 1516 (27 - 29).
Summary
It might go without saying, but printing changed the course of European history. We traditionally credit the invention of printing to Gutenberg, and while the idea of movable type printing was not new, Gutenberg synthesized several technologies to make printing practical for large scale endeavors. The mass production of a text in printed form helps ensure that texts survival, and thus thinkers and practitioners came to see themselves as achieving a kind of immortality: their words would survive through the ages.
Citation
Williams, George Walton. The Craft of Printing and the Publication of Shakespeare's Works. Washington: Folger Books. 1985. Print.
This first chapter is titled "The Invention of Printing."
The renaissance mind thought of printing as a way of conquering time. The earliest depiction of a printing press is in the 1499 La grant dans macabre, published in Lyons, shows three figures of death taking a compositor, a pressman, and a bookseller performing their work. Likewise, a 1567 French illustration (printed in Poitiers) of a printing press in La Fauconnerie de messire Arthelouche contains two mottoes: vitam mortuo reddo ("I restore life from death") and je ravie le mort ("I despoil death") (15).
The 1578 Book of Christian Prayers contains the motto "We Printers wrote with wisedome's pen: / She lives for aye, we die as men." (15).
Prior to the development of the printing press, books were transmitted through copies created by scribes one word at a time. A form of mass production of texts was possible with a single individual reading aloud from a book while multiple scribes write down what they hear. Either of these forms of textual transmission were slow, tedious, costly, and subject to human error. The time and monetary cost involved limited the production of books to those that were of special importance or significance to the producers (19).
"Though it is easy to say that Gutenberg invented printing, it is not so easy to define what that invention actually was; for the invention of printing depended not on the contrivance of a single mechanical device but on the development of several devices, techniques, and elements and on the synthesis of them all" (20).
The idea of movable type existed before Gutenberg, but he invented a practical process for doing so (20 - 21).
The earliest printed document from Gutenberg's print shop is a Papal Indulgence from 1454; other early works include selections from school books, calendars, and scraps of poetry (21).
In November of 1455, Johannes Fust, Gutenberg's financier, foreclosed on the print shop, which continued operation without Gutenberg and printed the "Gutenberg Bible" in 1455 or early 1456 (21).
Between 1450 - 1500, the first 50 years of printing, more than 8 million books were printed in Western Europe, roughly 1/3 of them illustrated. This level of book production was unprecedented in the history of the world (23).
On 9 August 1516, a scholarly collector in Bologna wrote to a book seller in Leipzig -- 500 miles away, over the Alps and across a national boundary -- to order a book; he received the book less than 2 weeks later on 22 August 1516 (27 - 29).
Summary
It might go without saying, but printing changed the course of European history. We traditionally credit the invention of printing to Gutenberg, and while the idea of movable type printing was not new, Gutenberg synthesized several technologies to make printing practical for large scale endeavors. The mass production of a text in printed form helps ensure that texts survival, and thus thinkers and practitioners came to see themselves as achieving a kind of immortality: their words would survive through the ages.
Citation
Williams, George Walton. The Craft of Printing and the Publication of Shakespeare's Works. Washington: Folger Books. 1985. Print.
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.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Notes on The Foundation of Shakespeare's Text
Alfred Pollard is one of those names you keep coming across in the annals of bibliographic study, and rightly so. He, along with EK Chambers and RB McKerrow were some of the pioneers of bibliographic studies early in the 20th century, without whom we might still live in an era of catch-as-catch-can textual construction. I stumbled across his lecture The Foundation of Shakespeare's Text, originally read on 23 April 1923, and decided to give it a look.
At the time Pollard offered this lecture, he acknowledged the incompleteness of the bibliographic work that had been done up to that point on the first folio. Any bibliographic answers he can offer must perforce be incomplete (1). It's worth asking the question of how far we've come in the last 80 years or so. Certainly we do know more, but do we know enough to posit anything but incomplete answers? Will we ever?
"The foundations of Shakespeare's text must have been laid in his study and in the playhouse" (2). Pollard goes from there to declare that any piece of text that can be demonstrably linked to Shakespeare or his theatre requires investigation, and that any text that cannot be so derived should not be considered; this immediately rules out any edition following the 1623 folio, as these represent mere reprints of that folio (2).
Pollard establishes the difference between a good quarto and a bad as one that can be demonstrably linked to revisions of Shakespeare's hand. Intermediary quartos typically contain the inclusion of new errors, and where they correct errors of previous quartos, these corrections tend to be simple and mechanical in nature, and would not require access to the author (3).
Intermediary quartos are useful for charting the printing of the folio. As a printer would have an easier time setting type from a printed source, they very likely would have used recent quartos as a base text, and sent those to the playhouse for any corrections that would have been needed: this would have been easier and less expensive than arranging a new fair copy to be made. The result is that some of the errors from intermediary editions of quartos have made their way into the folio (4). If this is true, and Stanley Wells is correct in his assertion that Heminges and Condell printed the plays in the folio as closely as possible to the way in which they were performed, than wouldn't that admit intermediary quartos as evidence for Shakepeare's (or at least the King's Men's) authorship?
Pollard answers my question in the negative, citing the example of punctuation differences in Midsummer; where the punctuation there differs from the first quarto, it tends to come from the 1619 quarto, and thus Pollard proposes that this edition of the play, since it derives from one of less authority than the original, should be regarded as less authentic (4). Clearly, he and Wells would have some words.
Pollard's list of bad quartos include the 1597 Romeo and Juliet, the 1600 Henry V, the 1602 Merry Wives of Windsor, and the 1603 Hamlet (4-5).
Discounting the aforementioned "bad quartos," the other first quartos of Shakespeare are to be regarded as useful sources of comparison and should carry an authority comparable to the folio (5-6).
Pollard notes that there was a thriving industry in manuscript copies of stage plays as early as 1605. The literary stage directions, which often describe locales in detail (i.e. characters enter "atop the walls of Rome" as opposed to "above") may come from these copies as opposed to the author's hand. We have no way of knowing how many of the play texts burned with the first Globe in 1613, or even if any were burnt at all, but we do know that several Beaumont and Fletcher plays were in private collections during the interregnum and had to be purchased for publication (8 - 9). We thus cannot say whether "literary" stage directions are certainly original.
"We have to face the fact that the producers of the Folio preferred the acting-version used in the playhouse, and if lines written by Shakespeare were omitted from that were content that they should perish" (10).
Pollard proposes that there is a distinction between short plays and long ones, and that those written of one category may have commonly be expanded (or cut) to suite the other category. This could plausibly have been for touring performances, court performances, private performances, public performances during the winter months (when they would have to have been shorter to accommodate fewer hours of day light), or Sunday performances. Though Pollard admits these are all purely conjectural circumstances, the presence of extant shorter and longer plays suggests that sometimes shorter performances were called for (10). Fascinating.
Pollard on Shakespeare's revision of other dramatists: "He took over other men's plots, other men's drafts, other men's completed plays, and did t them what he was told, transmuting copper and silver into gold with an alchemy all his own. We applaud what he did, and invent fine phrases to glorify that which, in modern dramatists, we should regard as monstrous" (13).
"It was taken for granted that the stage-manager knew his business, and that the form in which each play had survived at the theatre was the form in which it should be preserved in spirit" (16). This quote, taken with Pollard's earlier remarks about the policies of copying the work of other dramatists, and Shakespeare's contentment to do the same and then to let the same be done to his own works puts the question of authority into a different light (13 - 14).
"Somehow a text was produced which, however far short it falls of what specialists could wish, has yet been good enough to allow Shakespeare to become the most famous dramatist of Englishmen, and the delight of men and women all over the world" (16).
Summary
Pollard is not looking for plays of the theatre, indeed, he seems convinced that he has them available, he is looking for the specific words that Shakespeare wrote. This seems a paradox to me; Pollard acknowledges Shakespeare was a man of the theatre, and that he practiced the then common techniques of his craft (albeit remarkably well); why should we then pursue the written word of Shakespeare outside of this context? There is a paradox evident in the quest for the unaltered hand of Shakespeare on the one hand, and the ever present knowledge that his hand was altered (or should I say inspired?) by the works of others from the beginning. Pollard seems to know that Shakespeare's works in the folio were, to some extent, corruptions of his original work, but also acknowledges that they're still among the best work ever written in English.
Citation
Pollard, Alfred W. "The Foundations of Shakespeare's Text." Annual Shakespeare Lecture. The Proceedings of the British Academy. Read 23 April 1923.
At the time Pollard offered this lecture, he acknowledged the incompleteness of the bibliographic work that had been done up to that point on the first folio. Any bibliographic answers he can offer must perforce be incomplete (1). It's worth asking the question of how far we've come in the last 80 years or so. Certainly we do know more, but do we know enough to posit anything but incomplete answers? Will we ever?
"The foundations of Shakespeare's text must have been laid in his study and in the playhouse" (2). Pollard goes from there to declare that any piece of text that can be demonstrably linked to Shakespeare or his theatre requires investigation, and that any text that cannot be so derived should not be considered; this immediately rules out any edition following the 1623 folio, as these represent mere reprints of that folio (2).
Pollard establishes the difference between a good quarto and a bad as one that can be demonstrably linked to revisions of Shakespeare's hand. Intermediary quartos typically contain the inclusion of new errors, and where they correct errors of previous quartos, these corrections tend to be simple and mechanical in nature, and would not require access to the author (3).
Intermediary quartos are useful for charting the printing of the folio. As a printer would have an easier time setting type from a printed source, they very likely would have used recent quartos as a base text, and sent those to the playhouse for any corrections that would have been needed: this would have been easier and less expensive than arranging a new fair copy to be made. The result is that some of the errors from intermediary editions of quartos have made their way into the folio (4). If this is true, and Stanley Wells is correct in his assertion that Heminges and Condell printed the plays in the folio as closely as possible to the way in which they were performed, than wouldn't that admit intermediary quartos as evidence for Shakepeare's (or at least the King's Men's) authorship?
Pollard answers my question in the negative, citing the example of punctuation differences in Midsummer; where the punctuation there differs from the first quarto, it tends to come from the 1619 quarto, and thus Pollard proposes that this edition of the play, since it derives from one of less authority than the original, should be regarded as less authentic (4). Clearly, he and Wells would have some words.
Pollard's list of bad quartos include the 1597 Romeo and Juliet, the 1600 Henry V, the 1602 Merry Wives of Windsor, and the 1603 Hamlet (4-5).
Discounting the aforementioned "bad quartos," the other first quartos of Shakespeare are to be regarded as useful sources of comparison and should carry an authority comparable to the folio (5-6).
Pollard notes that there was a thriving industry in manuscript copies of stage plays as early as 1605. The literary stage directions, which often describe locales in detail (i.e. characters enter "atop the walls of Rome" as opposed to "above") may come from these copies as opposed to the author's hand. We have no way of knowing how many of the play texts burned with the first Globe in 1613, or even if any were burnt at all, but we do know that several Beaumont and Fletcher plays were in private collections during the interregnum and had to be purchased for publication (8 - 9). We thus cannot say whether "literary" stage directions are certainly original.
"We have to face the fact that the producers of the Folio preferred the acting-version used in the playhouse, and if lines written by Shakespeare were omitted from that were content that they should perish" (10).
Pollard proposes that there is a distinction between short plays and long ones, and that those written of one category may have commonly be expanded (or cut) to suite the other category. This could plausibly have been for touring performances, court performances, private performances, public performances during the winter months (when they would have to have been shorter to accommodate fewer hours of day light), or Sunday performances. Though Pollard admits these are all purely conjectural circumstances, the presence of extant shorter and longer plays suggests that sometimes shorter performances were called for (10). Fascinating.
Pollard on Shakespeare's revision of other dramatists: "He took over other men's plots, other men's drafts, other men's completed plays, and did t them what he was told, transmuting copper and silver into gold with an alchemy all his own. We applaud what he did, and invent fine phrases to glorify that which, in modern dramatists, we should regard as monstrous" (13).
"It was taken for granted that the stage-manager knew his business, and that the form in which each play had survived at the theatre was the form in which it should be preserved in spirit" (16). This quote, taken with Pollard's earlier remarks about the policies of copying the work of other dramatists, and Shakespeare's contentment to do the same and then to let the same be done to his own works puts the question of authority into a different light (13 - 14).
"Somehow a text was produced which, however far short it falls of what specialists could wish, has yet been good enough to allow Shakespeare to become the most famous dramatist of Englishmen, and the delight of men and women all over the world" (16).
Summary
Pollard is not looking for plays of the theatre, indeed, he seems convinced that he has them available, he is looking for the specific words that Shakespeare wrote. This seems a paradox to me; Pollard acknowledges Shakespeare was a man of the theatre, and that he practiced the then common techniques of his craft (albeit remarkably well); why should we then pursue the written word of Shakespeare outside of this context? There is a paradox evident in the quest for the unaltered hand of Shakespeare on the one hand, and the ever present knowledge that his hand was altered (or should I say inspired?) by the works of others from the beginning. Pollard seems to know that Shakespeare's works in the folio were, to some extent, corruptions of his original work, but also acknowledges that they're still among the best work ever written in English.
Citation
Pollard, Alfred W. "The Foundations of Shakespeare's Text." Annual Shakespeare Lecture. The Proceedings of the British Academy. Read 23 April 1923.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Making Shakespeare Notes: Chapter Seven
Rules of punctuation and spelling were highly variable in early modern printed texts. In the "Shakespeare" portions of the Thomas Moore manuscript, the author has punctuated, capitalized, and spelled words, sometimes within the same line, seemingly at random (138).
It was common practice for scribes and printers to add punctuation (and perhaps capitalization) according to their own tastes. It is unlikely that punctuation that has come down to us is original, and there are examples where the words may remain the same, but the sense of a line is altered by the punctuation (139).
From the evidence of the Thomas Moore manuscript, it seems as if Shakespeare in some cases wrote lines first, and then parceled them out to characters later. This might account for the confusion of the name of Pistol's wife in Henry V, and of the names of the Nurse's and Romeo's serving men in Romeo and Juliet (141-142).
It may be possible to discern the source of a printed copy by looking at descriptions of entrances. An authorial stage direction is more likely to provide an entrance for the character and scene, such as "enter gentleman on the walls of Rome," whereas a prompter will be more likely to write in terms of practical stage direction/architecture: "enter above." Texts that come from prompters also tends toward specificity in numbers; whereas an author may specify "lords and attendants," a prompter, who like any good stage manager would know who is available when, would be more likely to specify how many lords and attendants can enter at the given moment (144).
Prompters were responsible for editing play texts as required by the Master of Revels, such as removing swearing from the play, and then submitting those changes for official approval (144-145).
"Any Shakespeare text that can be traced to a prompter's book has already been repeatedly mediated by other hands" (145). Meditate on this: If the extant Merry Devil text has come from a copy that was cut for touring, it very likely comes to us from a copy of the touring prompter's book.
Since revenues from touring plays when the London theatres were closed were less than home performances, non-sharer members would not tour, and the plays would be altered to accommodate a smaller cast. Lines might be dropped, or characters might be amalgamated into one. Also, country audiences were not as sophisticated as city audiences, and thus the plays were cut to a shorter running time than they would have enjoyed in the London playhouse (145-146).
Since playwrights incorporated timely events and jokes into their plays, a very popular play, which might run for over a year, would need regular revising in order to keep the material fresh (146).
It is likely that many of the texts do not come to us in the form in which they had enjoyed life in performance at the time they were printed. Foul paper, one off, or otherwise deprecated versions of texts, would not have been discarded due to the cost of paper, but would have been kept in the company's reserves in case something had happened to the book then in use. The company could afford to send these archived copies, no longer necessary for the performance of the play, to the printer for publication where they may have been more reticent to part with a more practically useful text for that purpose (146-147).
Since print is easier to read than manuscript, a printed text, even if it was outdated, might find its way back into use by the company. A printed quarto could be augmented with manuscript emendations to reflect the play as it then existed in the company's repertory. This is what appears to have happened in the case of Romeo and Juliet, as the Folio text tends to closely follow the spelling and punctuation of the good quarto, but presents several changes over that text (147).
The realities of printing house practices also affect the plays that come down to us. Just as even good typists will make typos, even a good compositor will occasionally choose the wrong letter. Since compositors had to work quickly, like their modern touch-typist counter parts, they had to rely on their sense of touch and their knowledge of where certain letters were to lay them out quickly. Letters that felt similar and which were arranged in close proximity in the type case, could easily be confused (150 - 152).
It is also possible that decisions about spelling and punctuation would have been made to reflect the quantities of type available vs. those used heavily in the text. The speech prefix of "Bastard" for "Edmund" in King Lear may be a function of the heavy use of magiscule italic Es in the text, and thus the decision to refer to the character as "Bastard" may be nothing more than the printer's way of preserving E for other uses (Enter, Exit, and Edgar) (153).
Compositors were expected to edit the texts they were given to make them legible to their readers, but in the process of so doing may have altered the sense of the lines by mis-interpreting the playhouse text (154).
It is also possible that disfigured or poorly inked (or over inked) pieces of type have altered the sense of the texts. A damaged f resembles a long s, and this is why Ferdinand exults at having "So rare a wondred Father, and a wise" instead of "So rare a wondred Father, and a wife" (154-155).
SUMMARY:
The plays from early modern London that come down to us are many times removed from the hands of the men who wrote them. While it may be possible to spot some trends behind "the veil of print," the hand of the author is not one of them. Who wrote Shakespeare? is an irrelevant question. Who edited him is much more useful for the purposes of determining how the play may have been performed, and how the texts that we have might best be presented.
It was common practice for scribes and printers to add punctuation (and perhaps capitalization) according to their own tastes. It is unlikely that punctuation that has come down to us is original, and there are examples where the words may remain the same, but the sense of a line is altered by the punctuation (139).
From the evidence of the Thomas Moore manuscript, it seems as if Shakespeare in some cases wrote lines first, and then parceled them out to characters later. This might account for the confusion of the name of Pistol's wife in Henry V, and of the names of the Nurse's and Romeo's serving men in Romeo and Juliet (141-142).
It may be possible to discern the source of a printed copy by looking at descriptions of entrances. An authorial stage direction is more likely to provide an entrance for the character and scene, such as "enter gentleman on the walls of Rome," whereas a prompter will be more likely to write in terms of practical stage direction/architecture: "enter above." Texts that come from prompters also tends toward specificity in numbers; whereas an author may specify "lords and attendants," a prompter, who like any good stage manager would know who is available when, would be more likely to specify how many lords and attendants can enter at the given moment (144).
Prompters were responsible for editing play texts as required by the Master of Revels, such as removing swearing from the play, and then submitting those changes for official approval (144-145).
"Any Shakespeare text that can be traced to a prompter's book has already been repeatedly mediated by other hands" (145). Meditate on this: If the extant Merry Devil text has come from a copy that was cut for touring, it very likely comes to us from a copy of the touring prompter's book.
Since revenues from touring plays when the London theatres were closed were less than home performances, non-sharer members would not tour, and the plays would be altered to accommodate a smaller cast. Lines might be dropped, or characters might be amalgamated into one. Also, country audiences were not as sophisticated as city audiences, and thus the plays were cut to a shorter running time than they would have enjoyed in the London playhouse (145-146).
Since playwrights incorporated timely events and jokes into their plays, a very popular play, which might run for over a year, would need regular revising in order to keep the material fresh (146).
It is likely that many of the texts do not come to us in the form in which they had enjoyed life in performance at the time they were printed. Foul paper, one off, or otherwise deprecated versions of texts, would not have been discarded due to the cost of paper, but would have been kept in the company's reserves in case something had happened to the book then in use. The company could afford to send these archived copies, no longer necessary for the performance of the play, to the printer for publication where they may have been more reticent to part with a more practically useful text for that purpose (146-147).
Since print is easier to read than manuscript, a printed text, even if it was outdated, might find its way back into use by the company. A printed quarto could be augmented with manuscript emendations to reflect the play as it then existed in the company's repertory. This is what appears to have happened in the case of Romeo and Juliet, as the Folio text tends to closely follow the spelling and punctuation of the good quarto, but presents several changes over that text (147).
The realities of printing house practices also affect the plays that come down to us. Just as even good typists will make typos, even a good compositor will occasionally choose the wrong letter. Since compositors had to work quickly, like their modern touch-typist counter parts, they had to rely on their sense of touch and their knowledge of where certain letters were to lay them out quickly. Letters that felt similar and which were arranged in close proximity in the type case, could easily be confused (150 - 152).
 | |
| Photo of type case layout from Tiffany Stern's Making Shakespeare. The website she has credited is no longer in service. |
Compositors were expected to edit the texts they were given to make them legible to their readers, but in the process of so doing may have altered the sense of the lines by mis-interpreting the playhouse text (154).
It is also possible that disfigured or poorly inked (or over inked) pieces of type have altered the sense of the texts. A damaged f resembles a long s, and this is why Ferdinand exults at having "So rare a wondred Father, and a wise" instead of "So rare a wondred Father, and a wife" (154-155).
SUMMARY:
The plays from early modern London that come down to us are many times removed from the hands of the men who wrote them. While it may be possible to spot some trends behind "the veil of print," the hand of the author is not one of them. Who wrote Shakespeare? is an irrelevant question. Who edited him is much more useful for the purposes of determining how the play may have been performed, and how the texts that we have might best be presented.
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