Selling Shakespeare in the 1640s and ’50s

The period 1640–59 was one of restriction and extraction, with the theatres closed by order of law in 1642 and Shakespeare’s works more often sold in abbreviated form. Only three complete playbooks and two Shakespeare poetry books were printed. William Leake reissued The Merchant of Venice in 1652 and Othello in 1655, and Jane Bell published King Lear in 1655. John Benson’s octavo volume of Shakespeare’s Poems (discussed by Faith Acker in Chapter 8) appeared in 1640, and John Stafford and William Gilbertson’s octavo of The Rape of Lucrece, to which was appended The Banishment of Tarquin by John Quarles, followed in 1655. As Adam Hooks argues (Chapter 3), Quarles sought to enlist Shakespeare as a royalist in his continuation of Lucrece. The publication of Lucrece alongside a non-Shakespearean continuation of the poem demonstrates how ‘the political appropriation of Shakespeare … was already happening during the Interregnum, due to the efforts of poets like Quarles and publishers like Stafford’ (Hooks, Chapter 3). The configuration of Shakespeare as a royalist and the partisan alteration of his works, which Michael Dobson sees as a phenomenon initiated by Restoration playwrights such as William Davenant, therefore began earlier and with stationers (Reference Dobson1992).

Shakespeare’s works were also mined for extracts for inclusion in commonplace books and anthologies. While this practice was not new, it did gain momentum during the Interregnum, and alternative versions of Shakespeare’s plays may have been produced to enable consumers to mount their own, brief Shakespeare productions while the ban on public acting was in place.¹ John Cotgrave’s The English Treasury of Wit and Language, printed in 1655 by Humphrey Moseley, was the first commonplace book advertised specifically as ‘Collected out of the most, and best of our English Drammatick Poems’. The collection lacks authorial attributions but, as Gerald Eades Bentley has shown, Shakespeare was the most frequently cited author in the collection (Reference Bentley1943, 199–200). Laura Estill claims that Cotgrave’s organisation of extracts works to place ‘disparate [polemical] voices … in dialogue with one another’, thereby again drawing Shakespeare’s speeches into contemporary disputes (Reference Estill2015, 88). Other abbreviated versions of Shakespeare’s plays appeared shortly after the Restoration. Francis Kirkman published an octavo collection of playlets (often labelled ‘drolls’) in 1662,² and these included pieces taken almost verbatim from the Gravedigger’s scene of Hamlet and the Falstaff scenes from 1 Henry IV, while in 1663/4 Elizabeth Andrews published Thomas Jordan’s anthology, The Royal Arbor of Loyal Poesie, containing three new Shakespeare ballads, which were probably written during the Interregnum. These were based on The Winter’s Tale, Much Ado About Nothing and The Merchant of Venice. As the title of Jordan’s collection suggests, there is again much scope for a partisan royalist reading of the ‘Shakespeare’ on offer. Kirkman also published a longer droll, consisting of all of the scenes featuring Bottom from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (again, almost verbatim), separately as a quarto in 1661. These shortened Shakespeare publications thus helped to keep Shakespeare’s plots and characters in readers’ minds while arguably shaping his authorial image in important ways.

The stationers responsible for abbreviated Shakespeare publications of the Interregnum played a key role in the attribution of spurious plays to Shakespeare in the 1650s and ’60s. As Peter Kirwan’s tables show, a large number of plays were attributed to Shakespeare in Stationers’ Register (SR) entries and booksellers’ catalogues during the 1650s, making this the most concentrated period of new attributions to Shakespeare since the First Folio (Kirwan Reference Kirwan2015, 219–23). Moseley, the publisher behind The English Treasury, is famous for attributing Cardenio to Shakespeare and John Fletcher, and Henry I and Henry II to Shakespeare and Robert Davenport (both SR, 9 September 1653). Moseley also entered The History of King Stephen, Duke Humphrey, a Tragedy and Iphis and Iantha, or A Marriage without a Man as Shakespeare plays (SR, 29 June 1660). Kirkman issued The Birth of Merlin in 1662 which, although now almost unanimously rejected from the Shakespeare canon, featured a title page attributing the play to ‘William Shakespear, and William Rowley’. Moseley and Kirkman thus appear to have been expedient publishers who were keen to turn a quick profit, but their involvement in the history of Shakespeare printing suggests that they considered Shakespeare’s name to be vendible enough to merit attributing spurious plays to him, be it in print or else via entries in the Stationers’ Register.

The extension of the Shakespeare canon, which Kirkman and Moseley tried to initiate, was achieved in the form of the Third Folio, second issue (1664), which Kirwan discusses in more detail later in this volume (Chapter 7). As I go on to argue below, the Third Folio was one of only a handful of un-adapted Shakespeare publications issued during the first half of the Restoration, when the Shakespeare market was instead dominated by radically rewritten versions of his plays.

Selling Shakespeare During the Restoration

Shakespeare’s works, including songs from his plays, continued to be sold within anthologies and commonplace books during the Restoration. A prime example is the popular New Academy of Complements, first printed in duodecimo for Samuel Speed in 1669 (and sold for 1s. 6d, with further editions in 1671, 1679, 1680, 1681, 1694, 1698 and 1713).³ Thought to have been compiled by Charles Sackville, it contained ‘Where the Bee Sucks’ from The Tempest (154–5), ‘Who is Silvia’ from Two Gentlemen of Verona (155), ‘Spotted Snakes with Double Tongue’ of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (155–6) and others.⁴ The frequent publication of songs offers contrast with Shakespeare’s poems, which all but vanished from the book trade during the Restoration. A sole edition of Venus and Adonis was published by ‘F. Coles, T. Vere, J. Wright, and J. Clark’ in 1675.⁵ Although hugely popular during Shakespeare’s lifetime, Venus and Adonis had remained out of print for almost four decades. A Venus and Adonis droll was published alongside Bottom the Weaver in Kirkman’s 1673 Quarto edition of The Wits, suggesting again that there may be a connection between the appearance of abbreviated Shakespeare works and perceived market demand for something closer to the ‘originals’.

Shakespeare’s plays were seldom published without the adaptations of the Restoration stage, at least until after 1681/2. The years 1660 to 1682 witnessed the publication of only three Shakespeare quartos – Macbeth (1673), Hamlet (1676) and Othello (1681) – but sixteen quarto editions of twelve Shakespeare adaptations. These were The Rivals (Davenant’s adaptation of The Two Noble Kinsmen, 1668), four editions of The Tempest (John Dryden and Davenant’s adaptation with further additions by Thomas Shadwell, 1670, 1674, 1676, 1676), Macbeth (Davenant’s, 1674), two editions of Timon of Athens (Shadwell’s, 1678, 1680), Troilus and Cressida (Dryden’s, 1679), Romeo and Juliet (Thomas Otway’s Caius Marius, 1680), King Lear, Richard II and Coriolanus (all by Nahum Tate, Reference Tate1681, 1681 and 1682 respectively), Cymbeline (Thomas D’Urfey’s The Injured Princess, 1682) and two Henry VI plays (John Crowne’s The Misery of Civil War and his Henry the Sixth, 1680 and 1681 respectively). Playbooks of Shakespeare adaptations were thus more frequently sold than Shakespeare books during the first two decades or so of the Restoration, and the reprints of some suggest a measure of popularity.

A competitive commercial link existed between Restoration Shakespeare adaptations and the two Shakespeare quartos printed in the 1670s. Shakespeare’s Macbeth was published in 1673 by Cademan (publisher of Davenant’s Rivals). The first single edition of Macbeth was Q1673, and this differed from the Folio text only in the inclusion of the full text of ‘Come away, Hecate’ and ‘songs for the witches after 2.2 and 2.3’ (Brook Reference Brook1990, 225–6). It was followed in 1674 by an edition of Davenant’s adaptation of Macbeth, published by Andrew Clark. Thanks to the Term Catalogues, we know that both editions cost 1s ‘stitcht’, the usual price for Restoration playbooks (Arber Reference Arber1903–6, 134, 179). Cademan seems to have gazumped Clark, publishing Shakespeare’s Macbeth in order to cash in on the popularity of Davenant’s adaptation, which had been frequently revived throughout the Restoration and most recently in February 1672/3. Cademan disingenuously implies that his text represents the stage version with both his title-page puff (‘A tragedy. Acted at the Dukes-Theatre’) and by prefixing the text with an up-to-date cast list showing the Bettertons in the roles of the Macbeths. Clark was thus forced to distinguish his genuine edition of the Davenant text audiences had recently enjoyed by emphasising its novelty as ‘a tragedy: with all the alterations, amendments, additions, and new songs. As it is now acted at the Dukes Theatre’ (emphasis mine). It may therefore be that an adaptation that was popular in the theatres helped to encourage a stationer to publish its Shakespearean source. Either way, Q1673 Macbeth was the first Shakespeare quarto to appear in the Restoration.

The next Shakespeare quarto, the 1676 Hamlet, published by John Martyn and Henry Herringman, may again be linked to both its popularity in the theatre and to the success its publishers had enjoyed from the publication of other Shakespeare adaptations. As Claire Bourne explains in Chapter 12, Q1676 Hamlet claims to record performances at the Duke’s theatre by indicating lines cut in performance. It was a text that may have been used to test the market and Shakespeare’s vendibility ahead of a larger project to release a new Shakespeare folio. Herringman had previously published the Dryden and Davenant adaptation of The Tempest in 1670, which was one of the most popular plays of the Restoration period and also, perhaps not accidentally, the only adaptation that drew attention to Shakespeare’s role as a source author.⁶ Herringman’s Tempest had gone through three editions by the time he came to publish Hamlet. As Francis X. Connor notes in Chapter 4, Herringman acquired the rights to the majority of Shakespeare’s plays in August 1674 and yet waited until 1685 to publish the Fourth Folio. It may be that Hamlet Q1676 did not sell particularly well, causing Herringman to hesitate.⁷ Indeed, another Shakespeare quarto did not surface until Richard Bentley and Marion Magnes’s edition of Othello in 1681.

The next major Shakespeare publication came in the form of the Fourth Folio edition of his plays in 1685 (for the prices it fetched, see Chapter 5). Connor’s chapter in this volume focuses on the two main publishers of the Fourth Folio, arguing that financial gain was an obvious motivating factor, particularly for Bentley, but that we need to also consider the wider publishing career of Herringman and his apparent desire to self-fashion as a ‘literary publisher and cultural arbiter’. By examining the Fourth Folio in the context of Herringman’s folio editions of other pre-1642 playwrights, the so-called Triumvirate of Wit (Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Shakespeare), Connor demonstrates how Herringman’s career built up to these publications, claiming that the stationer was less concerned with the authors’ ‘immediate marketability’ and more preoccupied with leaving his mark on the literary world. If so, then rather than critics or theatre managers, Shakespeare has an ambitious stationer to thank for the production of a prestigious folio edition after a hiatus of more than twenty years.

Herringman and (more so) Bentley continued to publish Shakespeare adaptations in the 1680s and ’90s but, more significantly for the present study, Herringman, Bentley and their successors also began to publish (un-adapted) Shakespeare playbooks with greater frequency than at any point since the closing of the theatres in 1642. Hamlet was published in three new editions (two in 1683,⁸ and one in 1695), as was Othello (1687 and 1695), while Julius Caesar, which had until then appeared only as part of the folio collections, went through a massive five editions (1684, 1691 and three undated quartos),⁹ and 1 Henry IV was published in 1700, its first quarto appearance since 1639. Interest in Shakespeare publications thus seems to have been revived in the wake of the Fourth Folio.

Demand for Shakespeare was not simply revived but also sustained, as Lara Hansen and Eric Rasmussen demonstrate in Chapter 5. As they argue, the Fourth Folio sold well. Following Bentley’s death his stock, including warehoused sheets of the Fourth Folio, was purchased by another stationer who, realising that a number of the folio sheets were missing, went to the significant expense of reprinting them in order to make the edition complete and continue to sell the Fourth Folio. Rasmussen and Hansen identify the stationer for the first time and also confirm Giles Dawson’s hunch that the new sheets were printed in 1700. Scholars usually assume that it took twenty-plus years before another stationer was willing to invest in a collected edition of Shakespeare’s works but, in their work on what they label the ‘Fifth Folio’, Rasmussen and Hansen suggest that market demand was already high by the turn of the century. Thus, while scholars have tended to emphasise the eighteenth century’s importance as a turning point in Shakespeare’s print afterlife, the examples cited above suggest that stationers were already keen to invest in Shakespeare during the Restoration, and particularly from the early 1680s.

Selling Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century

The eighteenth century witnessed the birth of multivolume editions of Shakespeare, increased rivalry between Shakespeare’s publishers and revived interest in Shakespeare’s poems. Eighteenth-century stationers’ decision to employ named Shakespeare editors for their multivolume works may reflect their attempts to get around the much-anticipated 1710 Statute of Queen Anne by depicting the likes of Nicholas Rowe as author-editors (Marino Reference Marino2011, 8), and their labour in producing introductions and adding textual framing as ‘new work’ (Dugas Reference Dugas2006, 214–15). The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis appeared in Poems on Affairs of State in 1707, a collection that listed Shakespeare among the authors on its title page. Rowe’s 1709 octavo edition of The Works of Mr. William Shakespear; in six volumes (commonly referred to today as ‘Rowe’s Shakespeare’) marked the first of the multivolume collections, while also inspiring ‘two competing collections of Shakespeare’s poems produced as supplements to’ his edition: Bernard Lintott’s in 1709 and 1711, and Charles Gildon and Edmund Curll’s in 1710 (see Paul Cannan, Chapter 13, this volume). Alexander Pope’s Works of Shakespeare, again in six volumes but this time in quarto format, appeared in 1725, and he and Rowe were followed by a succession of editors. Thus, Shakespeare’s works were increasingly sold under his own name and in smaller, portable formats, while also becoming inextricably linked to named editors.

The eighteenth century might also be seen as the age of price wars and the moment when the printing and dissemination of Shakespeare’s works expanded beyond London. Shakespeare quartos continued to be published in London at the start of the eighteenth century – for example Hamlet and Othello remained popular, with editions in 1703 and 1705 respectively – but another knock-on effect of the Statute of Queen Anne was the beginnings of Shakespeare printing in Ireland. From Dublin, which was beyond the reaches of the statute, George Grierson published the first octavo editions of Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Othello (1721) and 1 Henry IV (1723), George Ewing published Macbeth (1723), and both men released The Tempest (1725), the same plays that had proven popular in London during the Restoration. Grierson and Ewing even produced a cheap reprint of Pope’s Works of Shakespeare in octavo format in 1725–6 and, as Andrew Murphy has stated, many such books were then imported into England, where ‘the Irish were underselling the Londoners by, in some cases, as much as 40 per cent, and were making significant inroads into the provincial markets’ (Reference Murphy2003, 123). The Dublin octavos provide useful context for Anthony Brano’s discussion of the Walker–Tonson price wars, when ‘all of Shakespeare’s plays became available in cheap, single editions’ (Chapter 6, this volume). Thus, Shakespeare’s works became far more accessible in the eighteenth century as a result of printing and distribution beyond London, and the increased availability of cheaper and portable editions.

Another development associated with the eighteenth-century book trade is the increasing use of illustrations. Like the top publications of the day, Shakespeare’s works were also adorned with new images that altered the ways in which readers received the printed text. Brano analyses the cuts printed with Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra in Rowe’s editions of 1709 and 1714, and with the first single-play edition of 1734–5, claiming that the latter affected not only readings but also famous productions, such as David Garrick’s production of the play, the text of which was edited by Capell in 1758. Brano’s essay offers yet more evidence of how Shakespeare publications were influenced by adaptations or alternate versions of the same plays as he suggests that the illustration of Cleopatra’s death scene resembles its description in Dryden’s All for Love. Dryden’s play, also published by Tonson, was a very popular version of the Antony and Cleopatra story that was frequently revived. It may therefore be that ‘the 1714/1734 illustrations of Antony and Cleopatra look the way they do because readers and theatregoers would have immediately identified with Dryden’s more popular [and frequently performed] play’ (Brano, Chapter 6). Stationers seem to have continued to cash in on the popularity of Shakespeare-related products in the eighteenth century, and an important link existed between illustrated playbooks and contemporary stage productions.

Thus, this part argues, Shakespeare’s plays and poems continued to be published, albeit often in abbreviated or adapted form, despite the turmoil of the Interregnum and the switch back to monarchical rule in 1660. The chapters that follow offer more detailed engagement with key moments and selling strategies within the history of Shakespeare publishing sketched out in this chapter. Shakespeare was frequently appropriated by partisan stationers and made to participate in contemporary disputes. Redacted versions of Shakespeare’s plays and poems arguably helped to provoke stationers like Stafford and Bentley and Herringman into producing new editions of Shakespeare and, following the publication of the Fourth Folio in 1685, Shakespeare playbooks enjoyed such a revival that one publisher thought it worthwhile to go the expense of reprinting the sheets needed to make up a complete folio edition in 1700. The eighteenth century witnessed the rise of multivolume editions and named editors, and saw stationers deliberately link Shakespeare’s plays to popular contemporary productions. But, perhaps more importantly, Shakespeare’s texts became more accessible than ever before as a result of the expediency and business acumen of stationers like the Tonsons, Walker, and Grierson and Ewing. The chapters that follow focus on the attempts made by stationers to anticipate and respond to the preferences of their customers, and in doing so situate interpretive decisions in the context of a drive towards vendibility, establishing the marketplace priorities that inform the rest of this volume.