Bard for Life

This is as it should be. Shakespeare deserves the attention, and the present scenario will likely be repeated to some degree in seven years when we celebrate the 400th anniversary of the publication of the First Folio, the first collected edition of 36 of Shakespeare’s plays—18 previously published in quarto and 18 printed for the first time. Theater historians estimate that about one-sixth of all plays performed in the early modern period (up until 1642 when the theaters were closed) are extant. Another sixth are known by their titles only. The other two-thirds are lost completely. Without the First Folio it is possible that we would have no Macbeth, no Tempest, no Julius Caesar.

In an effort, perhaps, to beat the competition to press, Emma Smith has published two books on the First Folio this year: one on why, and how, the book was published in the first place (The Making of Shakespeare’s First Folio), which will be of most interest to general readers, and one (Shakespeare’s First Folio) on its reception since its publication in 1623.

The most interesting question Smith tackles in her first book is why Shakespeare’s plays were collected and published in folio in the first place. Shakespeare’s popularity was generally on the decline both on stage and on page in the 10 years before 1623. As the King’s Men performed more plays at their new indoor theater at Blackfriars after Shakespeare’s retirement, sometime around 1613, they put on fewer and fewer of his plays, many of which were written for the open-air Globe. For the 1612-13 court season, 7 of the company’s 18 plays were written by Shakespeare; 10 years later, just 1 Shakespeare play was included in the season’s repertoire: Twelfth Night.

Sixteenth-century Shakespeare was “a valuable print commodity,” Smith writes, and the Swiss scholar Lukas Erne has argued that Shakespeare had “a commanding bibliographic presence among the dramatists of his time.” But the Bard’s early-17th-century work was printed far less frequently. Of the 14 plays written and performed in the early 1600s, only 4 were printed before the First Folio and only 1 (Pericles) in multiple editions. While 33 individual editions of Shakespeare’s work appeared in print from 1593 to 1602, the next nine years only saw 19 editions published. During the following nine—from 1613 to 1622—there were only 16.

In short, when he died in 1616, William Shakespeare was no longer the toast of London. There was no “outpouring of elegies” for Shakespeare, Smith writes, as there was for the actor Richard Burbage in 1619; nor was he buried in Westminster Abbey, like his fellow playwright Francis Beaumont, who died that same year—or Ben Jonson, who died in 1637. “His monument in Holy Trinity Church Stratford,” Smith writes, “was probably completed within a couple of years of his death, but it commemorates Shakespeare as a local man rather than as

a playwright.”

Why, then, did two actors from the King’s Men—John Heminges and Henry Condell—approach Edward Blount of St. Paul’s Churchyard about publishing a “complete” Shakespeare in expensive folio format a few years after the playwright’s death? One answer, obviously, is money. While Shakespeare may not have been as popular as he once was, there seems to have still been a market for his plays. We see this in the decision of the stationer Thomas Pavier to print six editions of Shakespeare’s plays (one collection of three plays and five additional plays printed separately) in 1619. Pavier’s Shakespeare collection may have needled the King’s Men into action. William Herbert, Lord Chamberlain at the time, lodged an injunction at the Stationers’ Company on behalf of the King’s Men: “It is thought fit and so ordered,” he wrote, “that no plays that his Majesty’s players do play shall be printed without consent of some of them.”

Whether the King’s Men had been planning to bring out a collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays before Pavier’s print run in 1619 or not, Pavier’s decision to print so many of Shakespeare’s works in a single year may have shown the company that his plays could still make money.

A second reason to publish a collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays is to honor and establish his and the company’s reputation. Even though it was actually cheaper to produce large amounts of text in folio than quarto, the folio format nevertheless “was a significant statement,” Smith writes, “about the value of the book’s contents, and about its cultural aspirations,” as well as about the legacy of the company itself. Folio buyers would often have pages bound lavishly. The books were to be used—Shakespeare’s early readers often annotated the Folio extensively—but they were status symbols as well. Ben Jonson’s plays were published in folio in 1616, and this may have motivated Shakespeare or his colleagues to prepare a collected edition of his own.

If Smith sometimes overstates the aesthetic significance of the collaborative effort required to bring out Shakespeare’s First Folio, her account of the various characters and their contributions in The Making of Shakespeare’s First Folio is an entertaining reminder that books are never entirely an author’s own.

Whatever the reasons for publishing the First Folio, it was neither a huge success nor a flop. While Jonson’s folio sold out in 24 years (a second edition was issued in 1640), Shakespeare’s sold out in 9. A third edition was printed in 1663-64 and a fourth in 1685. It wasn’t until the end of the 17th century, and largely because of the work of John Dryden, that Shakespeare’s reputation began definitively to surpass those of his contemporaries. “I admire him,” Dryden wrote of Jonson in his Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668), “but I love Shakespeare.” He “need[ed] not the spectacles of Books to read Nature.”

In Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book, Smith examines how the First Folio (and Shakespeare) came to be viewed over the years by critics, collectors, playwrights, and politicians, including David Garrick (1717-1779), John Horne Tooke (1736-1812), and, of course, Henry Clay Folger (1857-1930) and his wife Emily Jordan Folger (1858-1936), among others. While it is regularly stated that the First Folio is “one of the rarest books in the world,” as the Guardian put it last year, it is not. There is 1 copy of the first edition of Venus and Adonis, for example, and there are 11 copies of the 1640 Bay Psalm book, the first book to be printed in America. There are over 200 copies of the First Folio. Nor is it the most expensive book. Both the Gutenberg Bible and Audubon’s Birds of America have sold for more at auction.

Still, the book came to be valued by collectors and the public alike for various reasons: as a symbol of Englishness, of the greatness of English drama or Western art generally, of genius, even (for some) of radical politics. As Shakespeare’s fame grew after his death, so did the value of the First Folio.

Smith’s examination of how the First Folio was annotated and used in performances, as well as how it was acquired by collectors, makes for less compelling reading than her account of how the book was published. Irrelevant academic questions—such as why there were so few women involved in collecting the First Folio—add little to the scholarly value of the volume. What she does show is how differently the book was used by people across the globe—from England to America to South Africa—but also how universally Shakespeare’s plays spoke, and continue to speak, to people at different times and places.

Micah Mattix is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and associate professor of English at Regent University.